Recruiting Rural Youth to Healthcare Careers: a Scoping Review Protocol

There are shortages of healthcare workers in rural areas worldwide and these shortages negatively impact the health of the people living in rural regions. Efforts to promote, recruit and retain rural healthcare workers, can collectively be referred to as the Rural Healthcare Pathway (RHP) (historically the rural healthcare pipeline). Of the different stages in the RHP, recruitment of rural youth into healthcare career training, is the least well studied. Rural youth are in many ways the best candidates for a career in rural healthcare, but they face many barriers along their career journeys that their urban counterparts do not. The aim of this scoping review is to map what is known about interventions to increase rural youth pursuing healthcare careers, and what sorts of evidence exist