Achieving safe workloads for nurses is more important than higher wages when it comes to stopping health workers from cutting back hours or leaving the sector altogether, the nurses union has said, as the jobs and skills summit begins in Canberra.
Annie Butler, the national secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, said governments needed to pay more attention to keeping registered nurses in the profession, rather than training new recruits or scouring overseas markets for them.
Members of the New South Wales Nursing and Midwifery Association were due to take strike action on Thursday to push for mandated nurse-to-patient ratios.
“There is little point recruiting more and more and more nurses if you don’t fix the conditions in which those people are going to work,” Butler said before the two-day summit. “Retention is key.”
The union said national health workforce dataset from the federal health department showed 27,285 registered nurses and midwives were not in the labour force in 2021. That tally would probably have increased for 2022 given the extended demands on staff around Australia during the Covid pandemic, Butler said.
“Many nurses are truly exhausted and genuinely need a rest. During successive waves of Covid, leave got cancelled and people got called back to work. There was just this unrelenting and constant demand.”
The union counts more than 322,000 members and estimates nurses and midwives in various professional roles number about 400,000 nationwide.
Much of the run-up to the summit has focused on workplace relations and how employees’ wages have failed to rise at least as fast as inflation.
However, the falling jobless rate – now at a 48-year low of 3.4% – suggests more attention is needed on the skills aspects of work, particularly as employers find it harder to attract staff from a shrinking pool of jobseekers.
Nursing and other professions such as teaching have never had more accredited workers – but the challenge has been to keep them.
According to the nursing union, NSW, the most populous state, only brought in 2,800 graduate nurses and midwives in the public sector this year. Underscoring the intensifying competition for recruits, unions warned a $230m plan by the Andrews government in Victoria to pay the entire Help debt of more than 10,000 nursing and midwifery graduates could end up poaching talent from other states.
Shaye Candish, the general secretary of the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association, said working conditions under the current staffing model in NSW were “driving thousands out of the sector or interstate and we cannot have a systems of incentives that create further disparity between states”.
“Regular understaffed shifts, increasing workloads and excessive overtime is burning out too many experienced nurses and midwives,” Candish said.
Victoria and Queensland governments have mandated nurse-to-patient ratios, while the ACT and South Australia have committed to introduce such a policy. NSW, Western Australia and Tasmania are yet to make such a commitment.
“Evidence from interstate and overseas shows registered nurses either increased their work hours, or returned to the workforce once safe ratios were implemented,” Candish said. “If you create better working conditions, it is easier to recruit and retain people.”
Butler, the union’s national secretary said, that while workload conditions were critical, some wage issues were also vital.
“That’s particularly in the aged care sector, where they’re paid up to 25%-plus less [than average], so why would a nurse work in the aged care sector?” she said.
Other changes the union would like to see to include more support so that new graduates make a smooth entry to nursing. Data collection on what happened to them would also help planning.
“When students finish their degrees and get registration, do they get employment, where do they go?” Butler said. “How long do they stay in the workforce? There’s a whole lot of things that we could and should be doing.”
