Latest Nursing News

BALLARAT Health Services Base Hospital nurses regularly face verbal and physical abuse from aggressive patients, the nurses union claimed yesterday. And the introduction of extra closed-circuit TV cameras announced at the weekend would do little to make staff feel safer on the job, the Australian Nursing Federation said.

Nurses have begun a campaign demanding the Napthine government take urgent action to protect them from increasing violence in Victorian hospitals. The Australian Nursing Foundation has placed full-page advertisements in Melbourne's Sunday newspapers, warning that nurses and midwives are increasingly being punched, hit, pushed, kicked, bitten or threatened with weapons when trying to care for patients.

QUESTION: Where in the world could you go to find a place where half of all women are raped? ANSWER: Australia’s psychiatric hospitals. That’s the shocking conclusion of a new report from the Victorian Mental Illness Awareness Council (VIMIAC).

For the past 10 years, Janet Askew has taken her invaluable nursing skills abroad to places where they are needed the most. The 59-year-old mother and grandmother has nursed at places such as Indonesia, Iraq and Sudan, and next month she will head to Lebanon to work with Syrian refugees in her sixth Red Cross mission.

AUSTRALIA is way behind the US and Europe in protecting medical workers from sharp objects, says a former US nurse who contracted HIV and hepatitis C through a needle injury. Dr Karen Daley, in Melbourne to attend a nursing conference, says it is "surprising and distressing" that Australia does not have safety regulations.

Queensland Health Minister Lawrence Springborg has accused the nurses' union of scaremongering in the state's north with claims the region's hospitals are up for sale.

Health Minister, Lawrence Springborg says nurses are being exploited by the Labor Party and union bosses in a cynical campaign to promote the privatisation of hospitals for political purposes. “Not one existing Queensland hospital is listed for sale anywhere except on the Queensland Nurses Union website,” Mr Springborg said.

THE nurse responsible for implementing dozens of hygiene practices in Territory hospitals has taken out the 2013 NT Nurse of the Year Award. Tain Gardiner, who received the award at a ceremony on Friday night, said winning was fantastic praise - not just for her, but also for the rest of her team.

Senior nurses warned this week that the number of patients looked after by nurses has become dangerously high in some hospitals. Quoting research from the University of Southampton, the Safe Staffing Alliance campaign group said eight was the the maximum number of patients any nurse should look after at one time. Any more than this and a hospital would see 20 more deaths a year than better staffed hospitals.

NURSES are staging protests in far north Queensland as they continue to fight what they say is the privatisation of hospitals and health services.