NAHGOT Study: Taking Steps to Improve Sustainability, Reach and Scale

<p>Background:</p> <p>There is an urgent need to address the shortages of nursing and allied health professionals in rural and remote Australia. High quality longitudinal data is crucial to understand the antecedents and distribution of Australia’s health professionals to inform higher education programs and health workforce planning.</p> <p> </p> <p>The Nursing and Allied Health Graduate Outcome Tracking (NAHGOT) study began in 2017 to address this need. Now representing seven partner universities, with an additional four universities in the process of joining, NAHGOT collectively represents universities across Australia. NAHGOT is Australia’s largest multi-site, prospective, longitudinal tracking study of nursing and allied health graduates, exploring the influence of student background, placement experiences, and other factors on graduates’ geospatial mobility. It has unique potential for shaping rural and remote health futures.</p> <p> </p> <p>With the addition of new partner universities and potential changes in the policy landscape, the NAHGOT study protocol has been updated to better enable a sophisticated, sustainable approach to longitudinal graduate tracking, a longstanding requirement of University Departments of Rural Health (UDRHs) under the Rural Health Multidisciplinary Training (RHMT) Program.</p> <p> </p> <p>Data collection and methods:</p> <p>NAHGOT leverages multiple existing data sources and data collection methods. The study links nursing, midwifery and allied health student data from university administration systems (admission and placement data), nationally administered Quality Indicators of Learning and Teaching (QILT) Surveys, and registration data from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra) once a student graduates.</p> <p> </p> <p>For health professions requiring registration, Ahpra data on principal place of practice is used to track graduate work locations for up to ten years following graduation. Further information on practice location, practice location intentions, and factors influencing practice location decisions for all health professions are collected via a NAHGOT specific sub-set of questions embedded in the QILT Student Experience Survey, Graduate Outcomes Survey, and the Graduate Outcomes Survey-Longitudinal.</p> <p> </p> <p>A central repository and associated process has now been developed to consolidate each partner university’s deidentified datasets. As the NAHGOT study grows with more partner universities and eligible health graduate cohorts, this central repository is expected to have substantial national utility.</p> <p> </p> <p>Future considerations:</p> <p>To date, there has been five publications using NAHGOT data to assess workforce outcomes and associated decision-making among Ahpra-registered health professionals. Future directions for NAHGOT include further protocol changes enabling tracking of graduates working in self-regulated professions such as speech pathology, social work, and exercise physiology. While workforce information is collected through the Graduate Outcomes Surveys, there is the potential to link with more comprehensive work location data from these professional bodies/associations as is currently collected from Ahpra.</p> <p> </p> <p>Another major focus will be geo-enrichment of the database to enable place-based quantitative modelling of workforce distribution and person-level decision-making across Australia.</p> <p> </p> <p>The NAHGOT study has been enhanced to improve data processing efficiency and utility, making it the foremost study for understanding health workforce distribution across Australia. Specific federal resourcing has been identified as vital for sustainability as the operational needs of coordinating both the number of partner universities and the central data repository intensify.</p>