Nurses look set to have an expanded scope of practice in the near future, with both the federal health minister and a new workforce strategy backing calls to enable “nursing innovation”.
Health Minister Mark Butler fronted up to the Australian College of Nursing conference on Thursday morning and vowed to “find ways in which [primary care] nurses are able to do more, without having to have a GP notionally looking over their shoulder while doing it”.
He was there to launch the National Nursing Workforce Strategy, a 60-page document endorsed by all health ministers which set out 28 separate priorities for strengthening the sustainability of the nursing workforce.
These were grouped under four broad themes: enhancing planning, enabling innovation, elevating the profession, and delivering a sustainable workforce.
In terms of scope of practice, the initiatives under “enabling nursing innovation” carried the most weight.
These included creating and embedding funding models that drove evolution and enhancement of sustainable nursing practice, implementing nurse-led models of care and enabling nurses to work to their optimum scope of practice in all settings.
“Evidence shows, when health professionals are supported to work at their optimum scope of practice there is improved access to care for consumers, equal or better health outcomes in some areas and cost savings,” she said.
“Supporting Australia’s nursing workforce to use their full capabilities is critical in enhancing job satisfaction and wellbeing as well as supporting more efficient and effective care.
“System integration, collaboration and learning with multidisciplinary teams all help nurses work to their optimum scope of practice.
“Legislative and regulatory harmonisation across jurisdictions, particularly in the context of prescribing rights, will also remove barriers.
“Collectively, this will drive improved retention and more responsive, person-centred care.”
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Speaking at the ACN conference, Mr Butler said that without change, Australia was likely to face a substantial shortfall of nurses by 2035.
“[Increasing nurse scope of practice] will be, again, not just to the benefit of patients, but to the benefit of our overall ambition of keeping nurses in work — because we know that the more they are valued, the more they are able to deploy all of their skills and training, the more likely nurses are to stay in the jobs that we need them to stay in,” he said.
“I’m looking forward to that. You know, it’s a really significant discussion.”
AMA president Dr Danielle McMullen said it took a team to look after a patient, particularly patients with chronic and complex illness.
“GPs have long lamented the [fact that] we’re running immunisation clinics and having to go in and wave at the patient for the sake of billing,” she told The Medical Republic.
“We saw in covid, for example, where item numbers had different descriptors so that nurses could – where appropriately trained and qualified and working in a team – administer immunisations.
“… Practice nurses are well embedded in general practice, but we do need to think of ways that we can rethink funding and rules to make sure that we are working as effectively as possible with our nurses.
“In an environment where there are other pushes for broadened scope of practice without clinical governance or without teamwork, actually thinking about ways that practice nurses could work more within our practices is a really good place to start.
“That’s where we’ve been pushing the minister to focus his attentions, and so I think it is good that he appears to be following through in terms of his public commentary.”
ACN CEO, Adjunct Professor Kathryn Zeitz, welcomed the release of the workforce strategy.
“The evidence shows there will be an undersupply of more than 80,000 nurses by 2035 if current trends continue,” she said.
“Yet we are failing to do enough to support our new, mid-career, and late-career nurses to stay in nursing.
“The problem is not just recruitment, but retention: we are producing nursing graduates but do not have enough new-graduate roles for them to move into, and too many early-career nurses are leaving because they lack support.”
The Australian Primary Care Nurses Association also welcomed the strategy, with president Denise Lyons referencing previous research which found that nurses unable to work to their full scope were 59% more likely to burn out.
“The National Nursing Workforce Strategy recognises that addressing workforce shortages is not just about growing nurse numbers,” Ms Lyons said.
“It is also about creating the conditions that allow nurses to work to their full potential, develop rewarding careers and deliver innovative models of care.”
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