Prescribing, education funding and barriers to nurse practice were all raised when nursing leaders met with the Health Workforce New Zealand board last week.
The six nursing leaders met with the board to make a combined presentation to the HWNZ board in, what College of Nurses executive director and a spokeswoman for the group Jenny Carryer described as, the “beginning of a very important dialogue on workforce issues”.
The leaders addressed the board on the growth in demand for nursing services and called for persistent legislative and funding barriers to fully utilizing nursing to be “eliminated with speed”. Other issues raised included the need for leadership development – particularly for Maori and Pacific; the need for an NP registrar programme, addressing prescribing barriers, and concerns about education funding.
Carryer said the central theme was that nursing was taking a cohesive team approach and, following the Nursing Council announcing a “much more enabling” scope of practice, the profession was working together to develop a more responsive workforce.
HWNZ director Brenda Wraight said the board had a “very collaborative and productive discussion” with the leaders and hoped to meet with further nursing groups in the future. She noted nursing leaders could not give the board a consensus view on the profession’s three key aims but said the board was supportive of many of the issues raised including addressing legislative barriers to nurse practice, investing in programmes to grow the Maori and Pacific health workforce and looking at the potential for every graduate to be on a public or private NETP programme.
Wraight said the board also challenged the leaders to go away and form a workforce service review group to meet patient and service needs rather than professional needs.
She said HWNZ had ten sector-led workforce service reviews underway - ranging from aged-care to diabetes – looking at the workforce requirements to meet the population health needs in 2020 and beyond. Wraight said the nursing workforce was involved across all of the sectors but it had been difficult to know who to go to get a nursing perspective on each sector’s workforce.
Carryer said a point of difference between the board’s approach to workforce issues and the nursing profession’s was that nursing wanted to create a “dynamic and flexible workforce’ across-the-board rather than working on problems sector by sector in a piecemeal fashion
The other nursing sector representatives present were Susanne Trim, New Zealand Nurses Organisation; Carolyn Reed, Nursing Council; Judy Kilpatrick, Council of Deans Nursing and Midwifery; Gary Lees, Nurse Executives of New Zealand (NENZ); and Taima Campbell for the national Maori nursing and midwifery workforce development programme Nga Manukura o Apopo. Also contributing to the presentation but not represented at the meeting were the College of Mental Health Nurses and nurse educator group NETS.
