Unity Recruitment was established after it became evident how reliant Aboriginal Controlled Community Health Organisations (ACCHOs) are on agency staff to function at a safe level. With a move towards a casual health workforce, expectations of nurses for better work-life balance and greater mobility in work environments, ACCHOs are suffering staffing shortages or unable to attract experienced RANs
and GPs and often end-up on-boarding agency staff who aren't always the best fit. We aim to match the values of the ACCHOs we partner with and actively recruit nurses and GPs with the right values to work with remote First Nation communities. We believe you can't teach values or character, but you can teach skills and work with people on advancing and broadening their clinical skills and scope-of-practice. It takes a clinician who understands culture is the lens that gives meaning to everything and that this meaning frames what 'health' is and subsequent health-seeking behaviours. Further, we believe clinicians working for us need a deep understanding and appreciation that the social determinants of health are primarily linked to how power, wealth and resources are distributed in society. We don't want our nurses or GPs to 'victim blame' community members for their situation. We actively seek clinicians who have an empathy and desire to work to empower local health workers in a partnership model, and who also have a broad understating of community development principles and how these principles should be applied in their daily work while in community. We aim that some of our profits will be returned to community: We're looking at ways to fund certain activities of our ACCHO partners where it supports the concept of self-determination, capacity building (e.g. funding an AHP trainee to attend a conference or workshop), or the Rangers who look after country that sustains us, and many other activities undertaken by NGOs.
