More registered nurses needed—conference

Press, 24 August 1988, Page 9

More registered nurses needed—conference

PA Hamilton More registered nurses were needed in hospitals to cope with the growing amount of intensive-care work, said the principal nurse at Waikato Hospital, Ms Margaret McGill. , Ms McGill was discussing the role of the inten-sive-care nurse in the next 10 years at the National Intensive-Care Society conference in Hamilton. Her comments were greeted with applause by an audience of many nurses and fewer doctors and specialists.

They were made after a suggestion by Dr Jack Havill, of Waikato’s intensive therapy unit, that money could be saved in the nursing budget by employing more enrolled or lower-graded nurses in hospitals.

Dr Havill said that since nursing had gained a higher status with tertiary training, nurses had become more expensive. He questioned the need for high ratios of registered nurses in all hospital wards. Some wards’ needs could be adequately met by enrolled nurses, he said.

Enrolled nurses have only one year of training in a hospital and can only perform basic nursing duties similar to those of a nurse aid. But Ms McGill said there might no longer be a need to train enrolled nurses at Waikato Hospital. She said the convalescence role of hospitals was gone and most nursing duties were treatment of acute patients. These comments were backed up by the session’s chairwoman, Ms Janet Hewson, a Dunedin criti-cal-care educator.

In the next 10 years most hospitals would be 80 per cent critical care, Ms Hewson said.

“People will need to be really sick to be in hospital ... Others will be treated cheaper elsewhere,” she said.

Problems with high penal rates for nurses were discussed in the session. Ms McGill said this had meant some services at Waikato such as ear, nose and throat treatment, were shut at weekends.

One way of getting round this could be putting nurses on salaries.

Cost-cutting at Waikato Hospital had meant there were 30 fewer nurses than the hospital was funded for. Staff had been cut by not replacing nurses who left, she said. The hospital had received 200 applications from students for jobs next year but would be able to employ only 30, she said. Several speakers at the conference called for a higher professional status for nurses as recognition of their importance. A Waikato nursing teacher, Ms Kathy Taylor, said there were chances

for nurses to negotiate their own contracts with pay rates matched to their skill and education, under the State Sector Act. An American criticalcare expert, Dr Bart Chernow, said nurses had a higher status in the United States. It was important doctors and nurses worked together, he said. In the United States nurses had received a 17 per cent pay rise last year and started at $30,000 a year. This should rise to $50,000 in the next few years, he said.