Thanks to everyone for your opinions. Since posting I have been able to speak to a number of nurses both local and who work in Sydney region.

From your opinions and the others, it seems funding is the problem as the staff are needed and wanted but lack of funding limits their employment.

With massive ammounts going to health one has to ask why is there a lack of funds for nurses. The concensus seems to be that, since the abandonment of local hospital boards, there has been a massive build up in the administrative bureaucracy of the very large health service areas. This is taking a lot of the funding and leaves less for front line services. So much for the changes which were supposed to bring efficiencies and savings.

Suze mentioned the additional need to supervise new graduates. Funny that as I recall when nurses were calling for them to have academic quals in recognition of their professionalism, and so the training went from an apprenticeship type, on job training, to Uni based. They got their academic quals but now seem lacking in practical skills after getting a diploma. Strange that as I would expect an electrican or boilermaker to be able to do his work unsupervised once he has his ticket. Of course if one seeks to specialise in something then futher training is necessary, but for general duties it seems the old training system may have been better.

It seems a waste of 3 years training if nurses cannot get positions or enter the job only to find it is not for them. The academic quals then are meaningless.

I'm glad so many others got this thread before me or I might have taken it for a genuine enquiry, rather than an intro to some old-fashioned nurse-bashing.

Suze explained it fully: nurses in their first year require a graduate education program to ensure they practice safely and legally. That takes money and supervisory staff.

The old chestnut about university training for nurses being inappropriate comes only from people who understand zilch about nursing - and that includes doctors - or as a plea to return to traditional gender roles.

Hospital training was great when nurses were expected to be cleaners, porters, cooks, brow-moppers, and all-round nice ladies who held your hand while you died because the medical knowledge didn't exist to help you.

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It's 2009, Banjo. Medical technology is among the most advanced and complex fields of knowledge in human history. Pharmacology alone requires intensive study before a practitioner can be considered safe to do so much as give out a cup of pills. The MIMS annual contains more than 2000 medications. Would you like to be cared for by a nurse who didn't have a broad understanding of pharmacological effects, side effects, contraindications and dangerous interactions? Many people die in hospitals each year due to mis-medication. Without proper education there would be many more.

Then there's medical machinery, case-management, evidence-based wound care and recovery, nutrition, psychiatric health aspects, the myriad legal and ethical ramifictaions of practice that nurses must understand to be able work legally...

Despite the howls of the AMA, Australia is moving toward a nurse practitioner model precisely because nurses here have the education and professionalism to be independent practitioners. If you take tertiary education away, we won't train nurses of sufficient calibre to fill that role.

I have a few questions for you, Banjo:

1. Which skills do uni-trained nurses lack? I hear this canard often, but have seen no evidence.

2. A recent UK study (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8269729.stm) found that hospital deaths increased by up to 8% at the start of each year when inexperienced medical graduates begin working with patients. Senior doctors dub it "the killing season".

Would you argue, then, that doctors should be taken out of university and trained in hospitals? Tertiary education obviously isn't giving them the necessary skills to practice safely.

3. If you were in hospital would you like to be cared for by a nurse who can clean a bedpan in a jiffy, but knows knack-all about the half-dozen drugs he's giving you, or one who takes more time changing a dressing but knows that the pills the doc prescribed are likely to give you a seizure?

Can someone please tell me why Nurses have to pay a ridiculous annual fee to the Nurses Registration Board each year. The annual fee is currently $95.00. Apparently this fee is for maintaining your name on the Nurses Register. Does this country want Nurses? If so, Australia is certainly going about it the wrong way. Also if a Nurse wishes to work in other states they also have to register with that States' Nurses Registration Board and not only pay another annual fee but also an additional joining fee. How ridiculous is all this?