A letter in SMH this morning caught my eye. A writer claimed that about half of those who completed nursing this year, including her daughter, cannot get positions, yet our hospitals are crying out for staff.

Is this correct and if so why? I am left wondering.

It seems that not long ago we were recruiting nurses from overseas and now our own trained cannot get positions.

Is it a shortage of money for health or simply incompetence at the government level.

I would like to know what is going on.

Dear Banjo,

I googled "nursing shortages in Australia,"
and came up with heaps of websites.
It appears that we do have severe nursing
shortages.

Anyway, this website may be of interest:

http://www.nurseinaustralia.com/nursing-shortages-in-australia/

Banjo, I can tell you why.
New Nurses coming out of their training need lots of supervision, and hospitals have been told to cut their budgets.
That means only the very minimum numbers of nursing staff are employed on the wards.

They would be wanting only experienced nurses who don't need supervision and who can be left alone to work their butts off!
New Registered Nurses need to work with experienced nurses for at least the first year out of training- that would mean the Government would be paying nearly twice as much to employ and supervise that new nurse.
Many new nurses end up in nursing homes, where the pay is awful- simply to get employment.

suzeonline: "New Nurses coming out of their training need lots of supervision, and hospitals have been told to cut their budgets. That means only the very minimum numbers of nursing staff are employed on the wards."

Please, tell me this isn't true. The last time I recall seeing such short sighted planning was when the Queensland and Auckland electricity authorities were run by accountants. We (Brisbane) came close to loosing our grid. Auckland lost normal electricity supplies for 3 months.

Even the hard hearted, purely for profit and privately owned company I work for mandates a minimum ratio of apprentices to fully trained staff.

Banjo,
My suggestion would be that the author has specific issues such as location, hours on offer, personal preferences, specialization etc.

If one lived at one side of Sydney and the only jobs that met their criteria we on the other side of the city then you have a problem.

At our local hospital they have issues with older nurses wanting to work selected hours on selected days (their convenience not the hospital).

Even funding can be an issue.

Some nurses won't work in geriatric homes etc.

Some reasonably won't work at certain hospitals, percieved safety, working conditions, etc.

Not all hospitals are equal. while in Qld An emergency put me in a particular hospital which while the nurses/staff were fine issues of fights in the wards between patients, abusive language were rife, another hospital has an appalling record etc.

Having spent some time recently in a rural hospital visiting a relative with cancer and spekaing to nurses, it was disappointing to see the way hospitals are now administered from afar by area health services (NSW anyway). The difficulty to even get the required pharmaceuticals and medicines to treat patients requires mammoth effort and red tape. Sometimes nurses and other medical staff have even run out to a chemist themselves to get goods needed to do their jobs properly.

I remember this was reported in other hospitals in NSW - Dubbo I think was one and there was one in QLD from memory.

This is exactly the problem with razor gang mentality by some politicians. They may not intend the consequences to be felt at the coalface but unfortunately that is where cuts are made.

The only way to reduce the costs of public service is to reduce the size of the senior bureacracy and make it a goal to reduce the SES by 'x' percent (whatever deemed appropriate) and get rid of bonuses for senior managers for just doing their jobs.

This is one of the biggest wastes in government and takes away from the 'citizen focussed' goal of the current government (as written about in today's CT).

Part of living in a democracy is for citizens to be able to participate more and this won't happen without having a serious look at the relevance of having a large Senior Executive Service that takes away from the actual work of the public service.

There is something inherently wrong when policy makers and strategists out number the delivery staff, or 'doers'.