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Australian Health Review Australian Health Review Society
Journal of the Australian Healthcare & Hospitals Association
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Nursing as a career choice: Perceptions of students speaking Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Turkish or Vietnamese at home

Kwok Cho Tang, Christine Duffield, Xc Chen, Sam Choucair, Reta Creegan, Christine Mak and Geraldine Lesley

Australian Health Review 22(1) 107 - 121
Published: 1999

Abstract

Australia is a multicultural society and nowhere is this more evident than in Sydney where 25 percent of the population speaks a language other than English. In one of the largest area health services in New South Wales, the five most frequently spoken languages at home are Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Turkish or Vietnamese, with these language groups comprising 12percent of Sydney's population. Yet nurses speaking one of these five languages comprise less than 1 percent of the nursing workforce. A cost-effective method of addressing the shortage of nurses speaking languages other than English is to recruit students who already speak another language into the profession.This study examined high school students' perceptions of nursing in order to determine appropriate methods of recruiting students speaking one of these languages.Implications for the design of recruitment campaigns are also discussed.

https://doi.org/10.1071/AH990107

© AHHA 1999

Committee on Publication Ethics

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