Trained at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy Syd­ney, Saman­tha start­ed out at St Vincent’s Hos­pi­tal in Dar­linghurst before tak­ing on an Aus­tralian Col­lege of Nurs­ing schol­ar­ship at the Alice Springs Hos­pi­tal. It was a life-chang­ing experience. 

“I was only meant to be there for four weeks for my place­ment, but I real­ly loved Alice, and I thought, ​‘I’m not going back to the city,’” she recalls. 

“I stayed in Alice and worked both clin­i­cal­ly in ED and did after-hours/week­end work for Men­zies Health Research as a casu­al data collector.” 

Saman­tha had to return to Syd­ney for fam­i­ly rea­sons, where she worked on a casu­al basis at Nepean Hos­pi­tal, but the desire to be a remote area nurse was build­ing. That led her to take on more rur­al con­tracts at Goul­burn and Nowra before final­ly land­ing her first Abo­rig­i­nal com­mu­ni­ty con­tract with­in Far North Queens­land, east of Cairns. 

“That was my first taste of what it was like with the on-call com­po­nent of remote area nurs­ing,” she says. 

“It wasn’t far from Cairns by air, but a moun­tain range made us fair­ly remote. We had a doc­tor there 24 – 7, which was a fan­tas­tic learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me. I stayed there for four or five months, which allowed me to build up my crit­i­cal think­ing skills.” 

From there, Saman­tha ven­tured to even more remote regions. She took a nurs­ing role on the Far West Coast, almost a thou­sand kilo­me­tres west of Ade­laide on the edge of the Nullarbor.

But it wasn’t a full-time posi­tion, and she divid­ed her time work­ing alter­nate con­tracts between the Far West Coast and Far North Queens­land, with her down­time includ­ing trips back to Syd­ney to see fam­i­ly. While one was in the arid heat of the Nullar­bor and the oth­er deep into the trop­ics, there was a sense of com­mu­ni­ty work­ing with the Abo­rig­i­nal and Tor­res Strait Islander peo­ple for whom she’d achieved a connection. 

“I real­ly felt con­nect­ed to the Far West Coast in the three times I returned dur­ing a six­month peri­od. That was my first tru­ly remote expe­ri­ence, where I was hours from the near­est sig­nif­i­cant com­mu­ni­ty (of Ceduna). When I first arrived to the con­tract, it was just me, anoth­er agency nurse and a health worker.” 

When no full-time con­tract was avail­able at Yala­ta, Saman­tha took on a role at the even more remote Abo­rig­i­nal com­mu­ni­ty between Mar­alin­ga and the Great Vic­to­ria Desert. 

“The com­mu­ni­ty is very small and I’m not a coun­try girl, so it took a bit of get­ting used to. I still had the feel­ing to want to go for a cof­fee, to the movies. There were only two nurs­es and a health man­ag­er in the clin­ic, and it was hard yak­ka psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly work­ing ten weeks on and two weeks off. You had to put some­thing in your life at the end of your work­ing day, or you’d real­ly strug­gle. In my case, I stud­ied for my Mas­ter of Phi­los­o­phy (Nurs­ing) in Cul­tur­al Safe­ty and worked on my cook­ing skills.” 

How­ev­er, after six months, Saman­tha returned back to the Far West Coast. 

“Some­thing keeps pulling me back.” 

Saman­tha focus­es on the ben­e­fits rather than the draw­backs of remote work. 

“The highs are the con­nec­tions you make with peo­ple and how we can all come togeth­er to achieve the same goal. It’s real­ly a beau­ti­ful thing when you have peo­ple from dif­fer­ent areas try­ing to make this work. Now that I’ve been here for some time, I can now see more clear­ly how the wheel turns in pri­ma­ry health. I now have a much greater under­stand­ing of how one health check can influ­ence that person’s health and the amount of call-outs with­in a community.” 

It helps that Saman­tha, a mem­ber of the LGBTQIA+ com­mu­ni­ty, is able to work with her wife, a Nation­al Dis­abil­i­ty Insur­ance Agency (NDIA) con­nec­tor, in such remote areas. As oth­ers have before her though, she has also endured dis­crim­i­na­tion because of her sexuality. 

“LGB­TIQA+ peo­ple do face prej­u­dice by some indi­vid­u­als in com­mu­ni­ties,” she says. 

“The prob­lems I’ve expe­ri­enced are when peo­ple are angry and think I’ve done some­thing wrong on the job. It’s easy for them to use my sex­u­al­i­ty against me, instead of my nurs­ing treat­ment. It hap­pened just recent­ly. Thank­ful­ly my col­leagues and the organ­i­sa­tion have zero tol­er­ance for that.” 

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy has also been a major asset, with the CRANAplus Nurs­ing & Mid­wifery Round­table bring­ing a fresh and infor­ma­tive per­spec­tive to the work of remote nurs­ing staff. For Saman­tha, it was the oppor­tu­ni­ty to broad­en her knowl­edge, while get­ting a bet­ter under­stand­ing of oth­ers just like her.

“It was so reward­ing dis­cussing CRANAplus agen­da items with nurs­es rep­re­sent­ing areas I didn’t even know,” she says.

“We dis­cuss a range of top­ics, includ­ing what should be dis­cussed at con­fer­ences, Medicare billing for prac­ti­tion­ers and how to encour­age new peo­ple into this very spe­cialised workplace. 

“We dis­cussed work­force plan­ning. That you don’t need staff mak­ing up the num­bers, but the right kind of staff, and that not every­one is suit­ed to remote work. We shared sto­ries of peo­ple who arrive to the com­mu­ni­ty on Mon­day morn­ing, and they’re gone Mon­day after­noon. No judg­ment here, it’s the sort of job where you don’t know until you actu­al­ly get there.” 

Saman­tha remem­bers feel­ing that sense of iso­la­tion when she start­ed her remote nurs­ing career, but she over­came it by find­ing ways of remain­ing busy and com­mit­ted. In addi­tion to her Master’s degree, she has writ­ten a Web­ster-Pak pol­i­cy and pro­ce­dure admin­is­tra­tion guide to help and guide the var­ied sup­port work­ers. She also remains busy while com­plet­ing her PhD research­ing Cul­tur­al Safe­ty prin­ci­ples applied to sup­port trans and gen­der­di­verse nurs­es in the workplace. 

“You often don’t know if you can do the job until you actu­al­ly get there so I hope this helps,” she says. ​“We may be thou­sands of kilo­me­tres away from each oth­er, but we’re all in this together.”