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This article unpacks the wellbeing of primary care practitioners in remote and rural Queensland due to the inextricable link with workforce retention and sustainable health care services.
At Health Workforce Queensland (HWQ) we conduct an annual survey of primary care practitioners and managers to identify where they believe the biggest workforce and service risks are in their community. Mental health services and the mental health workforce overall persistently feature in the most critical gaps.
This year we wanted to find out how Queensland practitioners and managers believed their own health and wellbeing was. We framed a question asking participants to rate how well they were currently doing along eight dimensions of wellbeing. From slightly more than 1,000 participants the results suggested generally positive perceptions of current health and wellbeing in the rural primary care workforce. Participants also indicated that they believed their health and wellbeing was better as compared to two years prior. This trend was observed across general practitioners, allied health professionals and also the nursing profession.
To try to understand why this might be the case, medical practitioners at the Rural Workforce Forum, a session of the Rural Doctors Association of Queensland (RDAQ) Conference in June 2025 identified the following as underpinning factors:
Reduced hours and improved work-life balance has contributed to a more sustainable and satisfying professional experience.
Reduced COVID-19-related stress has eased pressure on practitioners, allowing for better overall wellbeing.
A shift in the value placed on work has encouraged healthier boundaries and priorities.
A more positive outlook among practitioners may be reinforcing a cycle of improved mental health and job satisfaction
In addition, when we looked at the survey results for medical practitioners, we found that those who had a principal role in private general practice tended to report much better wellbeing on most dimensions as compared to those whose main primary care role was within the public hospital system. The only exception was the financial wellbeing dimension, with this being a not entirely unexpected result.
During the same conference, polling results and table discussions indicated that the positive aspects about the private general practice setting that might contribute to better health and wellbeing were:
Greater flexibility in general practice allows GPs to better set their own schedule and maintain a good work life balance with shared or distributed on-call and overtime arrangements.
Salaried GP positions can provide stability without the added pressures often associated with hospital shift work.
Rural hospital roles may involve higher acuity, unpredictable hours, and emergency responsibilities, contributing to lower wellbeing scores.
There was agreement that the most important elements to health and wellbeing in a private practice primary care setting were manageable on call and shift work requirements, more employment flexibility, less bureaucracy and stronger patient connection in that order.
The RDAQ conference and survey findings paint a picture of optimism amongst primary care practitioners in remote and rural Queensland and provide some potential avenues that both public and private health services could explore to encourage better health and wellbeing for their staff, particularly through providing more employment flexibility and reducing the burden of inefficient administration procedures in the workplace.
You can read the HWNA Report via the button below. If you are eligible, you can also take this year's survey via the button below.
