I am currently on my rural placement and am enjoying the mix of inpatients, outpatients and community physio that I’m doing. It got me thinking about some of the benefits and drawbacks of working as a physio in the rural area.
The town where I am based has a population of around 13,000 and is situated in a beautiful area where many different outdoor pursuits are possible such as swimming, hiking, camping and cycling. Each day at the hospital has a lot of variety with mornings spent on the two wards seeing a mixture of medical and basic surgical patients and the afternoon spend in the outpatient clinic mainly seeing acute to chronic musculoskeletal patients. There was also ‘Easy Breather’ and ‘Gait and Balance’ classes to run and I was able to attend a couple of seminars and talks run by different rural health services. I began to consider whether I would work in the country and came up with this list of things to consider.
Pros of rural physiotherapy:
· The variety of work is interesting and maintains interest
· I find the country a beautiful setting to live
· There is a very laidback lifestyle
· Pay rates can be higher than metropolitan work
· You are given more responsibility as a new-graduate
· You feel part of the community
· You work closely within a small multidisciplinary team
· I could develop skills that could then be applied in 3rd world countries
Cons of rural physiotherapy:
· I would be away from family and friends
· Continuing professional development is limited and mainly self-directed
· There aren’t as many TV channels
· Everything’s more expensive (especially in mining towns)
· There’s limited opportunity for promotion
· Limited sporting opportunities
· You are unable to specialise in a particular area
· Complex patients are flown out so you miss out on experience with them
For me, I decided that I would quite like to work in the country but I’m going to stay in the city because of my group of friends, leadership responsibilities in my church and some of the volunteer work I’m involved in. However, it’s safe to say that my rural placement was definitely my overall favourite.
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1 comment:
Its a shame that our clinical placements are limited. Unfortunately i didn't do a rural placement because i did an international placement instead. If I had the chance to go rural I would have loved to because everyone has come back with such positive experiences. I will definatly consider working rurally in the future because of the variety of experience you would gain, more responsibilities you would have that excitement of somewhere new.
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