Thinking globally, acting locally
Published: 10 August 2009
Our recent QNU Annual Conference highlighted the global nature of the current challenges and opportunities that confront nursing and midwifery.
Increasingly there will be a need for nursing unions and other nursing organisations to work across national borders to address this myriad of common issues.
The international nature of the nursing and midwifery workforce and the need for ethical and sustainable migration strategies to underpin mobility are critical issues all countries need to confront urgently. Although there will always be international health workforce mobility (and this is a positive thing) developed countries cannot be allowed to strip developing countries of their much needed nursing and midwifery workforce in order to address their own deficits. The key to ensuring sustainable nursing and midwifery workforces around the world is local supply. We need to focus our efforts to ensure sufficient numbers of appropriately qualified personnel exist and are retained in our health system.
At the recent International Council of Nursing (ICN) meeting in South Africa the results of a global attitudinal survey of nurses was released. The survey of nurses from 11 countries focused on both the challenges and opportunities that they face.
Some of the findings include:
- Nine in ten (92%) nurses face time constraints that prevent them spending enough time with individual patients as they think necessary.
- Nearly all nurses surveyed (96%) say that spending more time with individual patients would have a significant impact on patient health.
- Nearly half the nurses (46%) say their workload is worse today compared to five years ago, potentially impacting the quality of patient care.
- Nurses are most concerned with heavy workloads (42%), insufficient pay and benefits (22%), a lack of recognition for their work (15%) and too much bureaucracy (13%).
- The best part of their profession is helping patients, with nurses most likely to report that patient contact (37%) is the most favourable aspect of their work experience.
Sound familiar? There are strong common themes with the findings of the most recent QNU Your work, your time, your life survey of members conducted by the University of Queensland.
The common themes of high workload and stress, poor skill mix and perceived lack of valuing also echo the work of Professor Linda Aitken of Pennsylvania University in the USA. Her research has identified that nurses perceive that inadequate staffing and high workloads are having a negative impact on the quality of care patients receive.
There are however, things we can do to address these serious issues which undermine the core nursing and midwifery values of caring, holism, professionalism and advocacy.
We need to act both locally and globally to address high workloads and inadequate staffing and skill mix. At the local level it is imperative that we work collectively with colleagues to promptly address workload and quality of care concerns. We have the ability, tools and frameworks to achieve this.
For example, the implementation across Queensland Health of the 4th edition of The Business Planning Framework: A tool for nursing workload management provides a validated framework for matching the demand for nursing services with supply.
At the national and international level we also need to work more closely with nursing unions and other nursing and midwifery organisations to share successful strategies and learn from our mistakes.
We also need to develop and maintain the international professional and industrial policy and regulatory frameworks that will advance our interests and values and sustain the delivery of quality care to our communities.
Having Australian Chief Nursing and Midwifery Officer Rosemary Bryant as head of the ICN positions us well to build upon the networks that already exist to further strengthen our agenda.
The ICN survey can be accessed online at www.icn.ch/Workplace_survey2009.htm
Click here to access the summary of the QNU Your work, your time, your life survey.
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