The National Nursing Workforce Strategy, launched today by the Federal Health Minister Mark Butler at the Australian College of Nursing National Nursing Forum, must be properly implemented to rectify the ad hoc, fractured approach to nursing workforce planning, and to set Australia up to meet its growing and more complex healthcare needs and avoid a workforce shortage of 80,000 nurses.
ACN says the release of the Strategy – Australia’s first – is an important milestone for the largest profession in the nation’s health and aged care system.
Nurses make up more than 50 per cent of the health workforce, and the Strategy is the first time nursing has been given a coordinated, national approach to workforce planning, investment, and reform.
“ACN has been strongly advocating for the Strategy for two years. It is a long-awaited recognition that the nursing workforce cannot be left to chance or be subject to fragmented, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction planning,” said ACN Chief Executive Officer, Adjunct Professor Kathryn Zeitz FACN.
The Strategy’s four priorities – Value, Plan, Design and Deliver – present a systematic approach to meeting Australia’s growing need for nursing.
It presents a commitment to nationally coordinated workforce data, modelling and planning, which ACN regards as the foundation on which every other action depends.
“The evidence shows there will be an undersupply of more than 80,000 nurses by 2035 if current trends continue,” said Adjunct Professor Zeitz.
“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.
“This has ramifications for the quality of care Australians receive – and highlights exactly why we need to take a more strategic approach to our nursing workforce.”
ACN welcomes the Strategy’s focus on retention, positive practice environments and enabling nurses to work to their full scope of practice. Retention depends on tangible improvements to remuneration, safe workloads and clear career pathways, not on framework development alone.
“Nurses have said repeatedly that pay, safe staffing and work-life balance are key to retention. We now need to translate the Strategy into the conditions that keep nurses in nursing,” said Adjunct Professor Zeitz.
ACN also welcomes the Strategy’s commitments on anti-racism, cultural safety and growing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nursing workforce toward population parity, and its recognition of the added challenges facing rural and remote nurses.
ACN is now calling on all governments to:
- Release a costed implementation plan with clear timeframes and accountable owners;
- Publish a monitoring and evaluation framework with measurable targets, including a target to close the projected 2035 shortfall;
- Act on supervision and support, wellbeing, remuneration, safe staffing and career structures as central retention levers;
- Enable nurses to work to their full scope of practice across all settings; and
- Sustain the collaboration between the Commonwealth and all states and territories that the Strategy’s success requires.
“ACN was pleased to host the Minister’s launch of the National Nursing Workforce Strategy at our National Nursing Forum,” said Adjunct Professor Zeitz. “This reinforces ACN and its members’ willingness to work with governments, employers and educators to turn this Strategy into real change for nurses and the people they care for.”
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