The ACT Government has announced $84 million in this year’s Budget to recruit more healthcare workers, make workplaces safer, and improve workplace planning across ACT health services.
“This is a mix of nurses and midwives, doctors, and allied health professionals all on the front line, supporting our growing community to deliver exceptional care,” health minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said.
But the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Foundation (ANMF) – ACT branch does not believe nurses and midwives will see much change.
“The situation for nurses and midwives after the budget’s brought down will be the same as the day before,” said branch secretary Matthew Daniel.
“They’re going to continue to face enormous demand, in which their safety suffers, the safety of patients can be put at risk, and care suffers; nurses and midwives continue to experience moral distress because they’re not providing the care they want to provide, they know they should be providing.
“If it was the pandemic alone, that would put context on the demand – but the shortage of staff and the demands on the health system have been there before the pandemic; it supercharged the problems that existed prior to the pandemic.”
One hundred more full-time equivalent (FTE) healthcare workers will be recruited in 2022–23, growing to more than 170 in the 2023–24 financial year. ACT Labor set an election commitment in 2020 of 400 more healthcare workers this parliamentary term; Ms Stephen-Smith expects to exceed that figure, funding 513 more FTE positions.
- Organisations welcome ACT Government’s four-year plan for more nurses and midwives (28 September 2021)
The government has committed $16.4 million to expand the allied health workforce (physiotherapists, social workers, psychologists, and occupational therapists).
“Having more allied health workers [will] ensure that people get the care they need, get discharged quickly, and are able to rehabilitate from the acute services that they receive in the hospital and get home more quickly to their families,” Ms Stephen-Smith said.
The nurse practitioner workforce at five walk-in centres will increase, while the Canberra Health Services centre at Molonglo will have more administrative staff, at a cost of $3 million.
- New Molonglo health centre provides free healthcare (28 April)
- New government health centre in Molonglo (22 October 2021)
The Health directorate, the Chief Minister’s directorate, Canberra Health Services, and Calvary Public Hospital are working on co-ordinated recruitment campaigns for nurses and midwives (90 have already been recruited, meeting ratios introduced last year), 30 more doctors, and allied health workers.
- Fifty new nurses begin working in the ACT (10 March)
Ms Stephen-Smith said the government would “get cracking” on the allied health care recruitment “as quickly as possible”; workers are available.
But Mr Daniel wonders where all those extra nurse practitioners will come from, given the government cannot find the workforce currently. The government also seemed unwilling to compete with other states and territories for nurses and midwives in the market, he thought; Victoria, for instance, offers sign-on bonuses of $3,000 – which the ACT Government refuses to do. The ANMF had asked for a $3,000 payment to recognise the efforts of nurses and midwives, and another $3,000 payment at the end of the winter to keep nurses and midwives.
“So in rejecting the calls for those payments, those attraction retention initiatives, what are they doing to stem the flow of nurses and midwives from our system?” Mr Daniel asked.
In fact, he said, while the government has recruited to the ratio numbers, at the same time, they have lost people out of the system. There was, he said, a net loss of nurses out of the system. Up to 30 experienced nurses had left the Intensive Care Unit at Canberra Health Services, while the ANMF ACT’s own statistics show that from January to June, 46 members transferred to the ACT from other states and territories – but 72 transferred out of the ACT to other states and territories. Recent ANMF meetings with health services mangers have confirmed that the ACT is losing nurses and midwives to other states and territories, he said.
Also in the ACT Government’s budget measures is $7.2 million to improve psychosocial wellbeing and address occupational violence, the next step of the Nurses and Midwives: Towards a Safer Culture Strategy (2018) – triple the 2019 investment.
“We need to continue that work to build a safer and more positive workplace,” Ms Stephen-Smith said.
Already, she stated, surveys show fewer people report being bullied or harassed in Canberra health services, while more people are confident that action will be taken if they report bullying and harassment.
The Strategy was developed with the ANMF, but Mr Daniel was cautious.
“Certainly, the money committed to the second phase … looks promising. But we need to look at the detail to make sure that it will actually address the issues as we see them… When is that going to happen? How much is the government going to commit to achieving that?”
The government will also spend more than $50 million to support the implementation of the Digital Health Record, which will record a patient’s interactions with hospitals, community health centres, and walk-in centres.
It will, Ms Stephen-Smith said, be a big transition for staff. The funding will backfill positions while staff are trained. This will slow down activity at Calvary and Canberra Hospital, so some elective surgeries will be performed in private hospitals, she said earlier this week.
“The government’s made noises that it wants to meet its elective surgery lists; how’s it going to do that?” Mr Daniel wondered. “They’ve talked about the private sector. That may be useful, but we don’t know what the numbers are. We don’t know exactly the extent to which that will alleviate the burden on the public health system.”
