S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

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sessional or outreach clinician. The report merely stated that ‘allied health workers identify where they work’, not whether they were based permanently in the region delivering a clinical service. Accordingly, comparing remote or very remote workers with those in major cities as a percentage of the total workforce, pharmacists are respectively 1.3% and 76%, physiotherapists 1.2% and 80.4%, optometrists 0.7% and 78.7%, chiropractors 0.9% and 75.3% and podiatrists 0.9% and 78.8%. On an adjusted FTE per 100,000 population comparison, across all allied health professions, remote and very remote were statistically significantly, to very significantly, lower than major cities and the lowest FTE of all remoteness classifications, across all allied health professions. 1.7 Overview of the Study Design The present study employed a single, explanatory and revelatory case study design using a holistic approach to positioning. Case studies are a form of intense inquiry, providing an in-depth picture of the unit of study (Flyvbjerg, 2011). In the present case, the unit of study is remote generalist nurses delivering mental healthcare, focusing on individuals, groups, organisations and social situations (Stake, 1995). Qualitative data were collected using face-to-face and telephone semi-structured interviews of the study participants relevant to the case. The data were subjected to interpretive thematic analysis. Findings from the thematic analysis were combined with secondary data sources relevant to the case and subjected to situational analysis (Clarke, 2005) using messy, ordered and relational maps to construct a social world/arena map of the remote nurses’ social world in delivering mental healthcare. Actor-network theory (Callon, 1986a; Latour, 2005; Law, 1992) was employed to analyse the relationships between the actors and groups identified in the social world/arena map of remote generalist