Challenges to employing recent nursing and allied health graduates in rural areas Tony Barnett, Belinda Jessup, Merylin Cross, Suzanne Mallick, Fiona Proudfoot, Amanda Cooper, Lyndsay Quarmby Centre for Rural Health, University of Tasmania Background Record numbers of nursing and allied health graduates are looking for employment due to the expansion in the numbers of students enrolled in these courses over the past decade. Nationally, there is emerging concern that the health workforce may be entering a phase of oversupply and that in some disciplines, the number of health care professionals trained will exceed the job opportunities available (Cusick, 2016; Fay & Adamson, 2017; Jackson, 2016). The potential upside to this oversupply is that positions in rural and remote areas could become more attractive to graduates who have not previously considered a career path outside larger cities. But are these jobs really out there? How can rural health services integrate relatively inexperienced graduates into their characteristically lean workforce? The employment situation in rural Australia is a complex milieu. For a start, the staffing profile is inherently lean, the skill mix limited (Bowen et al. 2018), and there are few resources to train and mentor students or new graduates. Graduate positions are usually short-term fixed contract positions which means that local health professionals who invest over and above their normal workload to train and support new graduates are unlikely to see a return for their efforts. Employers often tell us that they cannot employ new graduates because they just do not have the additional staff and time required to train them to the level required or to support them in a way that will encourage them to stay. At one extreme, we hear the plea from some employers, ‘I’m so desperate, I’ll take anyone!’ At the other extreme it’s, ‘no experience, no job’. The matter is compounded by the holistic, lifespan, cradle to the grave continuum of care required in rural practice which differs from the specialties and skill sets applied in urban settings. Rural health professionals operate under a broad scope of practice and require a wide range of advanced generalist skills to assess and manage situations with limited back-up support. The issue is exacerbated by the lack of time dedicated in health curricula to preparing graduates with the requisite skills for rural practice and articulating the differences and opportunities that a rural career path provides. The influx of new graduates directly impacts the ability of recent graduates to obtain employment. Furthermore, the training and support required for a new graduate can be time and resource intensive and difficult to arrange in the lean rural health care environment. Whilst many important rural health workforce initiatives are aimed at ‘growing your own’, rural origin students enrolled in