Aspects of rural nursing and staff retention - Essay Example

While rural is synonymous with poverty in developing countries, it need not be so in the case of developed countries though disadvantages of being rural are universal throughout the world in respect of inaccessibility of health services in rural areas and shortage of rural nurses. Scharff (1998, p 21) says that”….being rural means being a long way from anywhere and pretty close to no where”. It is a universal phenomenon that nurses are in short supply regardless of being a developed or a developing country.

Nurses are difficult to be retained even in urban areas. As such, nurses and nursing services in rural areas are even more problematic. In the first place, nursing is an occupation of sacrifice in that the nurses have to take care of the patients who must be made to feel at home while they are in the hospital. Nurses are therefore expected to be compassionate and loving their fellow human beings while in distress and this should come from a person naturally who can be called a prospective nurse.

Recruitment of nurses right from their nursing education need to be carefully planned by selecting the right candidates for the profession so that they do not find themselves misfit in the mid-path of their career. Assuming that all the nurses are rightly recruited and only the nurses of right aptitude are serving in the profession, there are still problems in their recruitment and retention attributable to the rurality of the areas of their service and inadequate policies of a country’s Government.

And these are the aspects that this research aims to go into with reference to the position obtaining in the U.K. Preliminary search in the literature shows that the there are no dedicated studies available pertaining to the U.K’s rural nursing and retention. The available ones deal with the broad category of rural health aspects wherein the nurses are mentioned along side the General practitioners, Pharmacists and allied