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While one-third of Australians live outside major cities, there are ongoing challenges in providing accessible, sustainable, and appropriate primary health care services in rural and remote communities. The purpose of this paper is to explore a partnership approach to understanding and addressing complex primary health workforce issues in the western region of New South Wales (NSW), Australia.

The authors describe how a collaboration of five organisations worked together to engage a broader group of stakeholders and secure commitment and resources for a regional approach to address workforce challenges in Western NSW. A literature review and formal interviews with stakeholders gathered knowledge, identified issues and informed the overarching approach, including the development of the Western NSW Partnership Model and Primary Health Workforce Planning Framework. A stakeholder forum tested the proposed approach and gained endorsement for a collaborative priority action plan.

The Western NSW Partnership Model successfully engaged regional stakeholders and guided the development of a collaborative approach to building a sustainable primary health workforce for the future.

Given the scarcity of literature about effective partnerships approaches to address rural health workforce challenges, this paper contributes to an understanding of how to build sustainable partnerships to positively impact on the rural health workforce. This approach is replicable and potentially valuable elsewhere in NSW, other parts of Australia and internationally.

While Australia has continued to invest in polices and strategies aimed at improving rural health service provision, many communities still confront a disproportionate share of the rural workforce shortage. The NSW Rural Doctors Network (RDN) contributes its perspectives about the importance of a whole of life career and the meandering stream concept to support the retention of health professionals rurally. We unpack these concepts and examine how they bring to light a new and useful approach to addressing rural workforce challenges and potentially contribute to building a stronger integrated care approach.

The approach used involved tapping into RDN's 30-years of experience in recruitment and retention of remote and rural health professionals, combined with insights from relevant existing and emerging evidence.

We suggest that reframing retention to consider a life stage approach to career will guide more effective targeting of rural health policies, workforce planning, collaborative approaches and allocation of incentives. We posit that an understanding and acceptance of modern lifestyles and career pathways, and a celebration of career commitment to serving rural communities, is necessary for successful recruitment and retention of Australia's future rural health workforce beyond the training pipeline.

We outline and visually represent RDN's meandering stream approach to building and retaining a capable rural health workforce through addressing life cycle and workforce level needs. This perspective paper draws on RDN's direct experience in the field.

This paper explores the impact of a suite of alcohol culture change interventions implemented by Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. The interventions were designed to change the alcohol culture at a bi-annual nation-wide university multi-sport competition known as Uni Nationals. This study aims to understand the critical success factors of the alcohol culture change initiatives that were developed by the university and implemented as part of a broader set of institutional practices.

A qualitative research design utilised in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nine Uni Nationals student team leaders. In total, two group interviews and four individual interviews were conducted with student team leaders who participated in the Uni Nationals. The interview transcripts were coded and themed. The themes were further refined and interpreted into a narrative. A total of two transcripts were independently coded by the first two authors. Discordant coding was flagged and discussed until a consensus was achieved. The remaining interviews were coded by the first author and discussed with the second author to ensure consistency. A socio-ecological framework was used to understand perceived changes to alcohol culture.

Student leaders were aware of and felt supported by the university-wide approach to changing the culture of Uni Nationals. Overall, the qualitative study indicated that students were positive about the alcohol culture change interventions. The leadership training that engaged team leaders in interactive activities had the greatest impact. Student leaders found the targeted messages, mocktail events and Chef de Mission (CdM) less effective cultural change strategies. However, they helped to establish expectations of students in this setting where a heightened focus on sport was associated with higher alcohol consumption.

While there has been growing academic interest in exploring “drinking cultures”, there has been relatively little focus on alcohol culture of university students at sporting events. The paper contributes to addressing this gap by shedding light on the impact of a group of interventions on the drinking culture of the Uni Nationals subculture.

Education, training and continuing professional development are amongst the evidence-based initiatives for attracting and retaining rural and remote health professionals. With rapidly increasing access to and use of digital technology worldwide, there are new opportunities to leverage training and support for those who are working in rural and remote areas. In this paper we determine the key elements associated with the utility of digital technologies to provide education, training, professional learning and support for rural health workforce outside the University and tertiary sector.

A scoping review of peer-reviewed literature from Australia, Canada, US and New Zealand was conducted in four bibliographic databases – Medline complete, CINAHL, Academic Search complete and Education Complete. Relevant studies published between January 2010 and September 2020 were identified. The Levac et al. (2010) enhanced methodology of the Arksey and O'Malley (2005) framework was used to analyse the literature.

The literature suggests there is mounting evidence demonstrating the potential for online platforms to address the challenges of rural health professional practice and the tyranny of distance. After analysing 22 publications, seven main themes were found – Knowledge and skills (n = 13), access (n = 10), information technology (n = 7), translation of knowledge into practice (n = 6), empowerment and confidence (n = 5), engagement (n = 5) and the need for support (n = 5). Ongoing evaluation will be critical to explore new opportunities for digital technology to demonstrate enhanced capability and retention of rural health professionals.

To date there has been limited examination of research that addresses the value of digital platforms on continuing professional development, education and support for rural health professionals outside the university and tertiary training sectors.

The consequences of problematic alcohol consumption fall heavily on Australian adolescents, with this population at increased risk of death, serious injury and other harm. Research regarding whether gender, socioeconomic status (SES) or locality play a role in young people’s alcohol consumption and related harm is limited in Australia. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether Victorian students’ patterns of alcohol uptake, consumption and related harm differed between gender, SES and locality.

The study involved secondary analysis of student data from the Drug Education in Victorian Schools harm minimisation drug education programme, undertaken in 21 Victorian government schools over three years The initial cohort of 1,752 students was followed during Years 8, 9 and 10, when their average age would have, respectively, been 13, 14 and 15 years.

There were no gender differences in drinking uptake, consumption or harm. Students with low SES were more likely to have consumed a full drink of alcohol and also experienced more alcohol-related harm. Students living in a regional/rural area were more likely to have engaged in high alcohol consumption.

The findings of this study highlighted that different student demographics have an impact on patterns of alcohol consumption, vulnerability and harm. Students with low SES, living in a regional/rural area, are more at risk than students with higher SES living in a fringe metro/major regional or metro area. Future school harm minimisation drug education programmes should consider the needs of students with demographics that make them more susceptible to higher consumption and harm.

Copyright is frequently mentioned at library IT conferences as a slight problem to be overcome. Instead, this article affirms that it is a major impediment which affects all players in the electronic information chain. Problems are reviewed both from the point of view of information professionals and copyright holders. The author suggests that librarians could take on the role of ‘emulsifier’ in mixing copyright and information.

In recent years there has been a decrease in the proportion of commerce students taking an accounting major in Australia (Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia, 2001), resulting in a greater proportion of first year accounting classes comprising non‐accounting majors. At our institution we felt that an approach based on “active learning” strategies as suggested by the Albrecht and Sack Report (2000) was appropriate for non‐accounting majors. This was primarily to instil a greater enthusiasm for and interest in accounting than had been evident from our experience with these students in the past. In the course evaluations the non‐accounting majors were positive about their learning experiences. In reviewing the students’ assessment performance we found that the non‐accounting majors actually performed better than the accounting majors in one of the five assessment components – the final exam. These findings suggest that the active learning approach may be beneficial to all accounting students.