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Aged Care Industry: Australian Nurses Tell Governments to ‘Stop Passing the Buck’

on Wednesday, November 20, 2013

A new national campaign from the Australian Nursing Federation (ANF), urges State and Federal Government’s to ‘stop passing the buck’ and to ensure that graduate nurses and midwives have jobs once they graduate.

The campaign is called “Stop passing the buck, Australia’s nursing grads need jobs” due to the recent reports of graduate nurses struggling to find work.

 

Some nurses are now being forced to move inter-state to find employment, and the ANF Federal Secretary Lee Thomas says statistics reflect a current lack of employment opportunities for university graduates.

“Almost every state is affected, with Queensland employing only 10% of graduates, while in Victoria more than 800 graduates nurses will be without employment” she said.

 

Ms Thomas spoke to Aged Care Online about the ‘passing the buck’ mentality between state and federal governments.

“There is so much buck passing between the state and federal governments. In terms of graduates, it’s a real issue… There are so many graduates without jobs, yet we have a predicted shortfall of over 100,000 nurses in the next 10 years.”

The ANF has suggested a range of strategies to help employ nurses and midwives throughout Australia, including ideas such as waiving HECS debt for nurses who are willing to go to in-demand areas, and rotations through non-traditional areas such as primary care and aged care.

Ms Thomas said that aged care was a non-traditional area because there are traditionally not a lot of graduate programs offered across the aged care sector.

“There are some providers who do offer graduate programs…but aged care is just one of the non-traditional areas, primary care is another” she said.

When asked if a strategy such as waiving HECS debt for graduates would be a practical expense for the Government, Ms Thomas stressed that it was just one of the many strategies that could be implemented.

“If we are really serious as a community of continuing to provide good, quality care – and Australia is known as having one of the most high quality care systems in the world, if we want to continue that we need to make sure that there is a health care workforce available.”

She said that the ANF supported all incentives whether they be financial help through grants to relocate to rural and regional areas or help by providing safe, affordable housing.

“The Federal Government says it’s a state problem, the State Government’s say it’s a federal problem…we say it’s everyone’s problem” she said.

More information about the ANF can be found here.

You can search for employment opportunities in aged care in Aged Care Online’s Employment section.

 

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