Latest Nursing News

Doctors and nurses will have their say on the new Royal Adelaide Hospital today and are expected to push for more staff to cope with the all-single-rooms hospital. State Parliament's Budget and Finance Committee has invited the Australian Medical Association, the SA Salaried Medical Officers Association and the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation to give evidence at a hearing this morning.

Getting doctors to service regional and remote areas is an ongoing challenge, but a new model of health care is helping to ease the burden on health services in north-west Queensland. Andrew McCallum is a nurse practitioner at the Mount Isa. He says a nurse practitioner is essentially a registered nurse who has undertaken some extra training in a speciality. Hospital.

Queensland Health Minister Lawrence Springborg has defended a letter from his Director-General threatening to sue the Nurses Union for breach of copyright if it failed to destroy anti-privatisation brochures which use an image of the Sunshine Coast University Hospital. ^[video]

Nurse-to-patient ratios for regional, rural and remote hospitals and clinics were one focal point of a widespread strike that took place in Sydney and across numerous sites throughout New South Wales on Wednesday 24 July.

IT IS only a matter of time before a patient dies at Royal Darwin Hospital because staff are too busy to help them, a nurse has said. The RDH staffer, who wanted to remain anonymous, said the emergency department had reached "crisis point" - again - this week.

Nurses and community workers from six Pacific Island nations are completing a much-needed mental health course at James Cook University in Cairns. ^[audio]

As part of its controversial privatisation agenda, the Queensland Government has confirmed that it will seek to fully outsource the running of a new hospital on the Sunshine Coast. ^[+audio]

I don't ever remember being as stressed out and worried as I am now. I've been at Liverpool Hospital for 13 years and the number of patients coming into emergency has doubled in that time. We suffer the most when nurses call in sick. On Monday I was short three nurses and we had 234 patients come through the doors. We admitted 109 of those. That is a very high number.

THE Newman Government will pursue the partial outsourcing of services at the new Queensland Children's Hospital but will not be opening up clinical services to the market. Health Minister Lawrence Springborg told a parliamentary estimates hearing a KPMG report had recommended the partial outsourcing of services.

A research project looking at the use of digital pen and paper technology by nurses and allied health teams in a Victorian hospital has revealed some interesting findings, not the least of which is that clinicians and computer programmers speak very different languages.