For eight weeks they will live in remote communities, and then they will have two weeks off.

Their employer has agreed to fly them to their closest capital city, in this case Darwin, so they can pay for themselves to go home.

At the moment, the Sunrise Health Service Aboriginal Corporation can't afford to fly them any further, but in the future the health service concedes to find the right people, they might have to pay to fly them all the way home, like a true FIFO.

Many other Katherine organisations struggle to attract professionals to the outback - social workers, school teachers, doctors are just some of those.

The FIFO solution may be the future, according to Sunrise's acting director of primary health care David Scholz.

"There is a national problem in recruiting to remote areas right across all professions," Mr Scholz said.

"We need to provide attractive options to staff, it needs a multi-faceted approach, we think this fly-in fly-out approach could be be part of it."

More than half of Sunrise's 26 remote area nurses leave annually, for a variety of reasons.

Isolation is chief among them.

Mr Scholz, himself a registered nurse, said it was important in their job to build trust in remote communities, especially with men, and high turnover is an ongoing problem.

Remote area nurses are regularly paid more than $100,000 annually and they are offered free accommodation and generous leave.

Katherine Times has recorded in the past how Katherine teachers are offered subsidised accommodation and higher pay to first entice them here, and to keep them.

The teacher's union says turnover in Katherine is the highest in the NT.

Territory Families in recent years identified an acute shortage in staff charged with protecting vulnerable children in Katherine several years ago, and pointed to the difficulties of attracting professionals to an outback area like Katherine, even with salaries of more than $100,000 annually.

The government organisation was also paying $15,000 bonus as well as many other benefits for people willing to work in Katherine.

Publicly, Territory Families was promising higher salaries, cash bonuses, subsidised or cheap accommodation, relocation expenses, travel costs and even accelerated advancement to entice people to the Top End town.

The NT Government has offered relocation bonuses for selected professions of about $5000 but few people have yet taken them up.

The Federal Government this week announced a grant of $485,176 for Sunrise Health to offer this FIFO package as a pilot program in an attempt to retain staff.

Mr Scholz said the FIFO deal could be six weeks on, two weeks off, or four-four, eight-two or other combinations including 12 weeks on and four weeks off.

"We understand the health workforce is changing, a lot more agencies are involved in recruitment.

"We have a lot of staff rotating through communities and in our job we really need to build rapport with our clients."

Mr Scholz said at present, even with the grant, Sunrise can only fly people in and out of Darwin, but he said that may have to change in the future to emulate other professions.

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