More than 200 health leaders packed out a recent workforce forum looking at interdisciplinary collaboration, flexible scopes and other workforce initiatives.
Brenda Wraight, director of forum hosts Health Workforce New Zealand (HWNZ), said one of the biggest challenges of the day was reaching consensus on forum themes because of the high numbers attending. “Some workshops were quite large and it was difficult to get consensus over the breadth of the sector”.
This included bring together the very diverse views of the interprofessional and flexible scopes of practice workshops. But Wraight said representatives from the different sectors at the workshop – including nursing, general practice, pharmacy and medicine – have volunteered to coordinate workstreams to follow up ideas gathered at the workshop.
Also, a workshop focusing on building the Ma¯ori and Pacific health workforce had made a “very strong recommendation” to reinstate a former District Health Boards New Zealand Ma¯ori workforce champion group and continue the work that had been under way, Wraight said.
Judy Kilpatrick, chair of the New Zealand section of the Council of Nursing Deans, said there was very good dialogue at the forum which attempted to get professions out of their comfort zone. Kilpatrick took part in the scope of practice workshop and came away believing nursing needs a shift in thinking so it doesn’t restrict itself from moving into new advanced practice areas. “Nurses need to step up to the plate and grab the opportunities.” She said nurses appeared to be still slightly fearful of stepping out of their scope of practice, but the Nursing Council had responded to such concerns by setting up criteria for expanded practice.
Helen Snell, chair of the Nurse Practitioners Advisory Committee (NPAC), said she was not quite sure the forum had achieved what it set out to do as far as creating an action plan. “It was a time for multiple views to be expressed and multiple ideas to be shared.” Snell said there was a lot of lively discussion at the interprofessional workshop about what was needed for inter-professional teams to function in the future. She said discussions about advanced practice had prompted her to get NPAC’s Nurse Practitioner Education and Clinical Education Programme onto the workshop’s work plan as a way of helping to enable inter-professional practice. (See sidebar.) The workshop’s next steps plan also included identifying best practice examples of interprofessional working and providing more interdisciplinary undergraduate and postgraduate training opportunities.
The flexible scopes of practice workshop concluded that existing scopes were flexible enough and the barriers to flexible roles were created by how professions and employers applied scopes.
Other themes explored at the forum included improving workforce research and data outcomes, the promotion of self-care and the single electronic healthcare record.
