Our nurses deserve Much better
By failing to adequately address staffing shortages and substandard working conditions for nurses, Tasmania is letting down some of its most valuable frontline workers, says
TASMANIAN nurses are the key to everything, but are not well treated. Before the recent state election, the government admitted that the Royal Hobart Hospital (RHH) alone was short about 250 nurses for a normal day shift, while in the home town of the Premier and two previous health ministers, the Launceston General Hospital (LGH) was about 170 nurses short.
You ask how come we are short of nurses and the answer is simple – the Department of Health (DoH) does not value nurses or their recruitment. Nothing is done.
The 2020 state budget appropriated funds to open 250 new beds at the RHH after a rapid refurbishment program, and employ an additional 190 new nurses to staff those medical surgical beds.
This cash was made available by Treasurer Gutwein, but it is highly unlikely that any of it has been spent on hiring nurses or refurbishing these wards to create 250 new beds for elective surgery.
These 190 new nurses were to be recruited on top of the shortage already existed, so 440 new nurses were needed at the RHH.
While about 190 new graduates have been recruited at the Royal Hobart Hospital, the nursing shortage continues, recently highlighted by the nursing union, but why is this so?
Firstly, the Health bureaucracy did not adequately brief the government on the key position that nurses occupy in the health food chain.
No nurses means no patient care. It is really quite simple.
DoH did not get this fundamental message across to the government.
No patient care means that the government is not caring for Tasmanians. This is the first duty of the government above all other duties.
There are huge elective surgical waiting lists, but no beds and no nurses. DoH is to blame, no one else.
Funds are available, but unspent.
The new Health Minister is now grappling with this.
Nurse recruitment should now be top of the food chain until the large number of nurses needed are put in place.
All other non-medical jobs in the DoH bureaucracy should be frozen to recruitment, until the nursing workforce is revitalised and meets the numbers needed by the government.
It is like an incentive package for DoH to do better, and it’s easy to measure with monthly public reports published by the government.
Secondly, the nonsense of trying to recruit nurses on one-year contracts and or, on temporary ad hoc employment (casuals) needs to be dumped.
Nurses look at the offers from other hospitals in Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide and just laugh at DoH.
Why am I going to work for less salary, with no permanent position guaranteed?
The answer to the DoH recruiter is “see you later”.
Thus, the newly graduated nurses from UTAS leave Tasmania because DoH cannot actually recruit people, and think that by offering any type of job to nurses graduating the course, that they will take it.
The mainland nursing recruiters travel to Tasmania each year and pick up a fair number of nursing graduates for their own hospitals.
The private health and hospital sector in Tasmania, likewise offers permanent positions.
You see, without a permanent position, you cannot get a home loan, and getting a house is hard enough as it is, without the dead weight of DoH hanging around your neck.
The recent report into the spread of Covid-19 on the North-West coast specifically noted the non-issue of PPE clothing and masks to nurses, because DoH was saving the PPE for a rainy day.
This is the sort of mentality that sees them value a nurse at the lower end of the health food chain.
If the DoH are going to escape a fairly serious inquiry from the Parliamentary Accounts Committee and an examination from the auditorgeneral into this appalling treatment of the government’s nursing workforce, it is about time that the present recruitment process gets dumped, and new people brought into smarten things up. They need to come from the private sector.
It would be useful if the Department of Premier and
No nurses means care. no patient It is really quite simple.
Cabinet took an active interest in why nurses are seen as being at the bottom of the food chain, when they are the key to getting people treated, and out of misery. Why have there been such recruitment failures? Why has this not been reported to parliament?
Maybe we should offer permanent positions to all nurses as a fundamental recruitment tool, offer them sign-on packages of $20,000, and further assistance in a range of needs that they have.
This has to be cheaper than the mess we currently have, with the hospitals choked with patients who cannot be treated properly or on time.
A solution has to be imposed by the government, with hard time frames.
Or else the health system will simply collapse through lack of staff.