Researching Australia’s migrant and mobile healthcare workforce
How do healthcare workers, students, and their families, navigate relationships, care and connections in the context of international mobility?
This project aims to investigate the experiences of Australia’s migrant and mobile health workforce in the context of severe worker shortages worldwide. It will explore how healthcare workers’ family relationships and informal care responsibilities shape their migration decisions, experiences in the workplace and plans for the future.
People who provide healthcare are more than just workers. They live multidimensional lives in which their professional skills, home environment, national identity and personal histories and biographies are crucially important in their migration decisions. Yet, current attempts to attract and retain healthcare workers are often overly centred on professional skills, rather than on healthcare workers as members of families, networks and communities, as well as skilled professionals. This narrow view neglects many dimensions of their lives, including their informal care commitments and attachments – caring for children or elderly parents, for example. Healthcare workers, as participants in both formal and informal care, provide an exemplary case for examining how care and work interact in contemporary Australia. The Australian healthcare system is globally connected via the movement of people and sharing of knowledge. This project investigates how these connections shape, and are shaped by, the delivery of care in the workplace and beyond.
More about this project
Led by researchers at The University of Sydney, and funded by the Australian Research Council, this project will investigate what matters to healthcare workers, healthcare students, and their family, friends and colleagues, when it comes to making decisions about migration, settlement, work and care. How do healthcare workers and students navigate care relationships (in Australia and overseas), and connections to workplaces and professional identities in the context of international mobility? Using in-depth qualitative methods (including interviews and focus groups), this study will produce a multi-perspective, relational understanding of the (past, present and future) circulations of people, knowledge and emotion within the healthcare field, and an evidence-base for policy change.
Australia faces chronic and worsening shortages of healthcare workers, compromising its ability to provide world-class care. Successive Australian governments have tried to attract and retain skilled migrants to help fill this shortfall.
This project explores how healthcare workers’ family relationships and informal care responsibilities shape their migration decisions. Findings from this research will help Australia to develop policies that are better able to attract and retain these much-needed workers by taking account of their whole lives as carers at work and at home.
In order to develop sustainable and humane policy solutions, we need this kind of person-centred knowledge. Without it, policy solutions risk proving ineffective, or at worst, deeply exploitative.
Why is this important?
Project updates
Want to find out where the project is up to and what the team has been working on? We will update this site with information about study recruitment, findings, events, articles and other plans.
As part of this project, we want to speak to:
Overseas-trained healthcare workers in the Australian health workforce and their families/colleagues; and
Australian-trained healthcare workers with experience of working/training overseas (e.g. international fellowships, secondments) and their families/colleagues;
Healthcare students and their families/friends.
Before you decide if you want to take part, we will tell you more about the project and what is involved.
Interested in taking part?
Contact
Please contact us on healthcare.migration@sydney.edu.au if you would like to know more about this research.