Researchers at Griffith University and the University of Melbourne would like to hear from final year students prior to graduation.
Employment uncertainty has been shown to have significant mental health effects: unemployment has been shown by meta-analysis to more than double the rate of mental health diseases, workplace reorganisation increases stress and blood pressure, and graduating students suffer high levels of anxiety. Currently, employment prospects in paramedicine are inconsistent; there are 8,454 tertiary students nationally, compared to just 21,685 AHPRA-registered paramedics.
Graduate paramedic roles in several Australian jurisdictional ambulance services are generally recruited using a ‘rolling recruitment’ model, where applicants are assessed (usually through a four- or five-step process), assigned an undisclosed ranking, and then remain on a waitlist indefinitely until employed. We theorise that this recruitment model – which is seldom used in other healthcare disciplines or other emergency services – has a negative impact on graduate mental health by exposing graduates to prolonged periods of employment uncertainty. Not receiving a definitive rejection at any point means that unsuccessful applicants may struggle to know at what point to seek alternate employment; one individual reported to the researchers remaining unemployed and on a waitlist for up to four years before ‘moving on’ and seeking alternate employment. No research investigating this has previously been published.
This study aims to follow a new group of graduates as they complete their undergraduate study and commencing seeking employment, to determine the impact of their mental health (using the DASS-21) on those exposed to rolling recruitment against those who are not. The study will follow graduates for 24 months, including after gaining employment (if they do so), to determine the longitudinal effect of time spent on rolling recruitment on their subjective mental health score.
To learn more, visit the study website https://reflexiveresearch.com/recruitment
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