The nation’s peak nursing bodies have united to urge the government to move forward on scope of practice reforms.
The scope of practice review is barely three weeks old, but Australia’s nine peak nursing and midwifery organisations are already at work to keep it front of mind as the next election looms.
“Securing support for the work of nurses, nurse practitioners, and midwives – particularly ensuring they can work to their full scope of practice – is a critically important election issue for the alliance,” the group said.
If the full recommendations of the scope of practice report were to be implemented, nurse practitioners, midwives and remote area nurses would be allowed to write Medicare-eligible referrals to non-GP specialist doctors, be eligible for more block funding related to nurse-led clinics and new bundled funding for maternity services.
Nurse practitioners and midwives have also recently been released from the requirement to have a collaborative arrangement in place with a doctor in order to bill for MBS services, making entirely nurse-led clinics more viable.
The Department of Health and Aged Care is also in the process of finalising the first national nursing workforce strategy, the draft of which recommends investing in nursing leadership and enabling nurses to work to their “optimum” scope of practice in all settings.
To put it succinctly, there is a lot of political energy backing nurses right now.
And its peak bodies – namely the Australian College of Nursing, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, the Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association, the Australian College of Nurse Practitioners, the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives, the Australian College of Midwives, the Australian College of Mental Health Nurses, the Council of Remote Area Nurses of Australia and the Council of the Deans of Nursing and Midwifery – are not letting that energy stagnate.
Politically speaking, these nine groups represent the bulk of Australia’s healthcare workers; nurses, nurse practitioners and midwives make up 54% of Australia’s health workforce.
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The joint campaign kicked off in Canberra on Tuesday, with a combined event for the Parliamentary Friends of Nursing at Parliament House.
Other planned activities include meetings with politicians of all stripes, public education about the quality, breadth and diversity of nursing and midwifery, activity on mainstream and social media and evidence-based policy and advocacy programs.
There are five core pillars to the campaign, variously promoting nurse and midwife skill, trust, experience, safety and underutilisation.
One of the key claims is that just one in three nurses and midwives say they regularly work to their full scope of practice, while another third say they rarely or occasionally worked to full scope.
The same alliance of peak nursing bodies, excluding the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives, co-signed a statement earlier this year which warned against “succumb[ing] to the polished lobbying of the medical and psychological professional organisations”.
“As a general principle … multidisciplinary teams do not need to be led by general practitioners, a false assumption circulated by the media, medical peaks and other platforms, driven by MBS billing arrangements rather than care needs of the person seeking treatment and alluded to in [Scope of Practice Review] Issues Paper 2,” they wrote in June.
“This expectation has led to the significant lack of access to and affordability of [primary healthcare] due to ever increasing costs imposed by GPs and is instrumental in the failure of the [primary healthcare] system in Australia.”
The GP equivalent of the nursing alliance is the National Council of Primary Care Doctors, which represents ACRRM, AMA, RACGP, RDAA, General Practice Supervision Australia, General Practice Registrars Australia and the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association.
