industry & reform
including doctors, or allied health professionals, it doesn’t
make such a significant impact. That’s the harsh truth of
the matter.
As a society, we vote for governments who will give us the tax
cuts, and we don’t want to see our taxes increase. Even before the
COVID-19 situation, we don’t want to see our taxes increase. That
means there’s limited money available for essential services like
health and education.
After this pandemic, will people still want to be nurses?
I am actually really hopeful that one of the outcomes of the
pandemic will be that we will see more people wanting to
become nurses. And I hope that we see more applicants for
nursing programs across the whole of society, because ideally
a nursing workforce should look similar to the society that it
provides care for.
We need nurses from all walks of life. We need men.
We need women. We need young nurses. We need older
nurses. We need nurses from different cultural backgrounds,
different sexual orientations. We simply need a broad spectrum
of people to come forward and become nurses.
But what we know now, and what hasn’t changed in the
40 years I’ve been a nurse, is that we get comparatively few
men joining nursing, because nursing continues to be seen as
women’s work. It would be lovely to change that.
Does society fall back on the idea that nursing is a calling, and
perhaps that’s why its value in society is not as high? Do we
need to rethink our perception of the profession?
Without a doubt. And certainly there is a view that nursing is a
calling. Some people are inspired to join nursing because of their
desire to care, and that’s tremendous. But that alone doesn’t get
you through when the going gets tough; when you want to give
the best care but you can’t, simply because there’s too much
demand for your time.
That’s exactly when we get into situations of burnout, and then
we lose them. There are some pretty old-fashioned views that
nursing is good for women when they have children, which can
blend with family commitments, rather than this is a profession
that can take you around the world.
What are some of the key areas we should be looking into to fix
nursing going forward?
We need to fundamentally address the issue of the status of nursing.
It needs to be seen as a profession by society. Then, we need to
attract the very best applicants to nursing education, and invest in
education. And we have to keep our nurses once they’re registered.
It’s a terrible statistic that we lose so many of our nurses too
early in their careers, because they just simply find practice
too challenging because of the workforce constraints
they encounter. ■
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