Nurses and midwives are the heart of our public health system in New South Wales.
We need to attract and retain enough nurses and midwives to ensure our workforce can deliver the quality care patients deserve.
Improved workloads are essential for retention. Achieving the NSW government’s ratios rollout is necessary to ensure safe patient care. The government must fund the positions needed to capture every ward and unit in every hospital across EDs, ICU, adult wards and units, maternity services and MPSs, including AiNs as supernumerary. But workload improvements alone will not rebuild our ...
Nurses and midwives are the heart of our public health system in New South Wales.
We need to attract and retain enough nurses and midwives to ensure our workforce can deliver the quality care patients deserve.
Improved workloads are essential for retention. Achieving the NSW government’s ratios rollout is necessary to ensure safe patient care. The government must fund the positions needed to capture every ward and unit in every hospital across EDs, ICU, adult wards and units, maternity services and MPSs, including AiNs as supernumerary. But workload improvements alone will not rebuild our workforce after more than a decade of neglect.
Successive governments have failed to prioritise nursing and midwifery pay, and our fatigued workforce is responding with its feet.
Nurses and midwives have long been crying out for better pay and conditions. It’s time the NSW government backed up its words and recognised the worth of nurses and midwives by coming to the table with a competitive pay offer. This is essential to retain nurses and midwives here in NSW, and entice nurses and midwives to move to our state for well-paid jobs.
In the next state budget, the NSW government must properly remunerate the workforce that our public health system relies on to provide care for all patients.
Nurses and midwives deserve more in 2024.
Our public health system suffered through more than a decade of neglect, with insufficient wages failing to attract and retain the workforce necessary to deal with the demand. There is now an opportunity to bring on lasting change, by delivering competitive wages for nurses and midwives, and investing further in the rollout of ratios.
Email the NSW Treasurer to demand the government invest in public health to deliver a safer, more sustainable system.