Latest Nursing News

Nurses at Albury's Community Mental Health Service have begun work bans to protest against what they say is chronic understaffing. Members of the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives Association say their case loads have become unmanageable because the local health district is failing to backfill staff on leave.

A lack of high quality, authoritative information resources for families of potential organ donors is amplifying the ‘ick’ factor of organ donation, according to Holly Northam. Over the last few weeks a number of incidents in the public sphere have highlighted the problem of callous, inaccurate and insensitive representation of organ donation

The chairman of the Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service says he is not expecting a community backlash over the sale of three rural facilities. The service is getting rid of the Babinda Nurses' Quarters, Mount Molloy Hospital Reserve and the old Ravenshoe Hospital, with the proceeds going to Queensland Treasury.

There is uncertainty over the future of medical services in the small town of Bollon in Queensland's southern inland. The Uniting Church's Frontier Services organisation took over the bush nursing clinic in Bollon nine years ago.

Louise Johnston - a nurse from Ballarat - has just returned from a refugee camp in Iraq where she's been working with Syrian refugees delivering primary and mental health care. Through her involvement with Medecins Sans Frontieres Australia - or Doctors Without Borders - Ms Johnston has spent the last four and a half months in the camp on the Syrian border in the Kurdistan area of Iraq.

Nurses on the South Coast have criticised the local health board for closing a dozen beds at the Shoalhaven Hospital. A spokesperson for the hospital said services wouldn't be impacted, as there's not a demand for the beds in Medical Ward B over the summer period. Linda Griffiths from the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association said the measure is not about adjusting resources. She said it's a cost cutting exercise.

CONTROL of public hospitals should be stripped from state governments and given to communities, while nurse-to-patient ratios should be scrapped as part of measures to control spiralling health budgets, a study says. The Centre for Independent Studies report says health costs nationally have risen by an average 7.75 per cent a year for the past decade and total annual spending was now $40 billion.

BULLYING is driving many staff to quit the public health service, exit surveys reveal. Most of the 485 people who completed the surveys were frontline health workers, including doctors and nurses. The Sunday Times this week obtained two reports on the results of exit surveys from 2012-13.

YOU could do a lot worse than have Annabel Pike by your side in your time of need. The 22-year-old nurse from Hendra doesn't know why she won the Pride of Australia Care and Compassion Medal - but her patients do. "I'd love to know who the patients were who nominated me to ask them what they thought was different or special," Ms Pike, who works at Mater Private Hospital, said. "I love the human side of nursing. The Intensive Care Unit and hospital in general is a very stereotypically scary environment and if you can do anything to make it easier, more calm, less invasive or foreign, you've got to do that.

NURSES will take industrial action next Friday if a government offer is not amended. About 70 nurses and midwives met in Burnie yesterday com Oct 11 to discuss possible action. Nursing and Midwifery Federation state secretary Neroli Ellis said the new enterprise bargaining agreement for the state's public sector health workers was insulting and did not show respect from the state government.