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Sydney Morning Herald, May 22, 2002 Wednesday
Chronic understaffing, increasing pressure on bed availability and less time for patient care had resulted in an exodus of 1700 nurses from the public health system and led up to 80 per cent of those remaining to look for other work, a report released yesterday found. The Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training (ACIRT) study recommended a significant increase in nurses' pay and key changes in the management of work to stop a further drain of nurses from the system. The report, commissioned by the NSW Nurses' Association, found that an increase in pay alone would not attract nurses to the profession working conditions such as adequate time for patient care and safe parking were of equal concern. Clinical nurse Lyn Hopper, who has worked in the public health system for 30 years, said it was only the love of nursing that kept her in her job. "It is being able to sit and talk to a dying patient, or discuss a patient's diagnosis with them ... but with our workloads now we have less and less time for that level of care," Ms Hopper said. "I look at my peers in other professions earning big bucks, and I think of myself decades of experience, a degree and several certificates, managing a ward and 30 staff with a budget of several million dollars, and I get paid less than $50,000 per year." The acting general secretary of the NSW Nurses' Association, Brett Holmes, said the report backed the union's call for a pay increase to keep nurses in the public system. "Those intrinsic rewards of being a nurse caring for patients have been removed to the point where nurses are just running from one patient to the next and ... eventually they say 'I cannot wear the guilt anymore, I am out'," Mr Holmes said. The association believes the figure of 1700 vacancies is "grossly underestimated". "In 2012, if we do not turn around the current trends, we will see a hospital system that is not able to provide the level of care that we currently have," Mr Holmes said. Dr John Buchanan, from ACIRT, said many of the 87 nurses in the report told stories of colleagues throwing themselves on the floor, screaming because of the pressure. "Every group reported stumbling across nurses who were sobbing in corridors or in discreet places out of the wards," he said. The report found nurses had more responsibilities than ever, picking up the tasks usually done by other professions such as physiotherapists and dieticians. A spokesman for the NSW Health Minister, Craig Knowles, said the Government acknowledged the chronic nursing shortage and had been trying to recruit nurses and entice those who had left the system to return. The Nurses' Association's case for a 15 per cent pay rise for public sector nurses comes before the full bench of the NSW Industrial Relations Commission next month. The claim also includes a qualification allowance to recognise the special skills of nurses with additional education and a retention allowance.
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Copyright © 2002 Macquarie Institute, Australia
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