Nurses to train on the ward

THOUSANDS of new nurses will be learning their profession through a return to traditional on-the-job hospital training under a new scheme to be announced by Prime Minister John Howard today.

The courses will help turn around a 25-year trend in Australia for nurse training which now produces graduate nurses who have never seen a baby being born or experienced first-hand work on an emergency ward or operating theatre.

Nurses taking part in the new courses will have their wages topped up by the Federal Government and hospitals will be given financial incentives to take them on for training.

Once it is up and running, the $170 million nurses education program will see 500 Australian nurses a year graduating after working and training in the wards of public and private hospitals.

As part of today's announcement, Mr Howard will also unveil the establishment of 25 new Australian Hospital Nursing Schools.

The promised funding, which is on top of existing higher education funding, will provide for new lecture theatres, instructors, general training facilities, wage subsidies and completion bonuses.

Over time, the Government hopes the program will lift the stocks of graduate nurses, helping to ease the chronic shortage of trained nurses in Australia.

Over recent decades, nursing training has been shifted out of hospitals completely and on to university campuses. Courses usually run for three years, but some trainee nurses go on to do Masters and Doctorate level training.

However graduates miss out on old-fashioned ward training and the drop-out rate for university trained nurses is quite high.

According to government research, many hospitals discover graduate recruits' first exposure to a hospital environment -- after three years of theory training at university -- quit the job because it was not what they expected.

By Gerard McManus

Article from www.news.com.au/heraldsun