The following excerpt from an article printed in The Age on May 2, 2015.
‘Help the nurses to keep us all alive.
The cost of health is exploding in Australia.
Nurses are a great group of people but I have to say, they’re badly done by. This highly qualified profession of mainly women simply don’t get paid enough for the lifesaving work they do. If we’re not careful, we suddenly won’t have the nurses that we need.
Consider the fact that for the last 20 years, nurses have been rated number 1 as the most trusted profession in Australia, with 91 per cent of Australians ranking them as very high or high for ethics and honesty. The rankings make sense.
Nursing is now a profession requiring a tertiary degree as a minimum standard with options for even higher levels of attainment. Hours are very long and the workload is demanding because of a chronic shortage of nurses. According to a Monash University study, 15 per cent of nurses are considering leaving in the coming year. Their average age is now 44.5 years and the number of them over 50 has increased from 33 per cent to 39 per cent in the four years to 2011. In short, we’re running out of these incredible people and not replacing them.
So how much do they earn? A registered nurse with a degree earns between $52,000 and $79,000 pa — and that’s less than any executive’s PA.
We’ve got a new Health Minister, Sussan Ley. She replaced Peter Dutton who was voted the worst health minister in memory. I think Ley is going to make a difference and one way she could write herself into favourable history is to fix this developing crisis. My suggestion is that she immediately starts moving funds from a centralised and useless bureaucracy and overgrown administration to the nurses on the hospital floor.
After all, if we don’t look after our nurses, who will look after us?’
Harold Mitchell: Help the nurses to keep us all alive
May 2, 2015. The Age http://www.theage.com.au/business/comment-and-analysis/harold-mitchell-help-the-nurses-to-keep-us-all-alive-20150501-1mwtwg.html
Whilst the article refers to nurses working in the hospital setting, it is relevant for all of us, and we have all walked a few miles in these shoes haven’t we?