Mapping nurse mobility in Canada with GIS: career movements from two Canadian provinces

Recent years have witnessed the publication of a growing number of studies of nursing which, from a disciplinary perspective, are geographical in their orientation. Conceptually, while the emphasis in much of this research has been focused at the micro scale on the dynamics between nursing and "place," curiously there has been scant attention to geometrical "space," and the basic yet important locational and distributive features of nursing at the macro scale. Noting this gap in the literature, the authors of this paper used a Geographical Information System (GIS) to map the movement of 199 nurses from two Canadian provinces where they were educated - Manitoba and Newfoundland - to the provinces where they currently live and work. While the findings show that nurses who move tend to move to nearby provinces, more generally they illustrate the effectiveness of GIS for managing data and representing findings from workforce studies.