 My name's Len Crocombe with the Centre for Research Excellence in Primary Oral Health Care and this is a group between three universities, the University of Western Australia, Tasmania and Adelaide and we've been looking into the oral health of Australians and how we can make it better. We know that rural oral health is much poorer than it is in the capital cities and there's a few reasons for that but one of the reasons is that there's much poorer access to dental care and there's a much lower number of dentists and other dental practitioners in country areas than city areas so we wanted to look at why, what would attract dentists to move into rural areas and what would make them possibly more importantly what would make them stay there. We looked at through interviews, a literature review and are going to do a survey to look into, to ask the practitioners themselves why did they decide to move into a rural area or why did they decide not to move into a rural area. The most interesting thing was that there hadn't been much research done in the past at all. Any research that there had been was along the lines of using medical practitioners and saying it would be the same for dentists and of course we are different. The main thing that we found that the big factor for moving to a rural area was that it had to be viable. The practice actually had to be viable so that was the big hump that you had to jump before anything else could be considered and so government schemes financial schemes might attract people to move to rural areas but it didn't get them to stay in rural areas. To get people to stay in rural areas was a completely different set of factors and those set of factors were basically more social ones also was to do with education. It was to do with occupation for the spouse and the social things about being part of the community rather than feeling left out. Rural Health Workforce Australia, they were extremely interested in the results which came out and basically were using that as part of the process to try and get the dentists that they actually get to move to rural areas to get them to stay there.