Editor’s view: Life-saving nurses must be treated with respect they deserve

Nurses are a shoulder to cry on, the backbone of our health system and must be treated with the respect they so rightly deserve.

Nurses must be treated with the respect they deserve.

They are literally life savers.

A shoulder to cry on when we’re sick or have lost a loved one.

They put their lives on the line during the pandemic to treat the sick.

And they are the backbone of our world-class health system.

Yet Australia’s nurses are not being treated with the respect they so rightly deserve.

As a story in The Sunday Mail today outlines, this nation is facing a chronic nursing shortage as alarmingly one in five are abandoning our hospitals and clinics.

A Sunday Mail investigation has found that 75,000 highly trained medical professionals have quit since Covid arrived in 2020.

The pandemic alone prompted up to 20 per cent of the resignations which came about because nurses simply could not obtain leave.

There is a laundry list of problems confronting these critical health workers.

They face increasing abuse from patients, doctors speak down to them, there are those relentless requests to turn up for extra shifts and, at the end of the week, there is often a woeful pay packet.

Since 1993, all registered nurses in this nation have had to enter the profession via a (at minimum) three-year tertiary degree.

In that decade there were expectations that nursing salaries would increase to meet the more stringent qualifications.

There was, and still is, anecdotal evidence of highly qualified nurses earning good salaries in this country and across the developed world.

Yet the stark reality is that an Australian registered nurse – whose core job description could be summed up as “saving lives’’ – receives an average salary of $83,722. That is less than a librarian or a warehouse manager.

There are numerous traffic controllers in this state, fronting up for the night shift to operate those stop and go signs, who earn more than double our tertiary-educated nurses.

Australians are rightly proud of a health system which, for all its faults, cares for all citizens in a manner which would stun the average American.

Yet this nation cannot afford to take our modern health system, which in its present form has only been operating for half a century, for granted.

Australia is confronting a demographic tsunami as our population ages and the pressures on our world-class, publicly funded health system increase dramatically.

It will be nurses who take up the bulk of this increasing workload, and it should be recognised that many of them take on their role for genuinely honourable reasons.

Many men and women who opt for a nursing career do not necessarily consider it a “job”.

They see it as a vocation, and are notorious for putting in those extra hours to meet the demands of their work not only in times of emergency, but when they feel an individual patient needs a little more of their time and attention.

Yet their dedication to helping their fellow human beings is clearly being exploited by a system which appears determined to extract as much work as possible from them for as little remuneration as can be gotten away with.

Part of the evidence of that is that nurses, in their own words, report being “guilted’’ into performing overtime.

Nurses want an urgent, 35 per cent pay rise for 450,000 frontline nurses, midwives and assistants in nursing as well more reasonable overtime provisions.

They also want a change to the current retrograde law – dubbed in their own words “professional slavery” – where Medicare pays nurses half of what a doctor gets for the same tasks.

Many of the problems our nurses are dealing with have clearly been fashioned by history.

Up until the mid-20th Century, nurses were almost exclusively female and therefore denied the respect and remuneration accorded doctors, who were almost exclusively male.

If we are to retain our world-class health system, we are going to have to readjust our attitudes towards nurses. We must cease taking their devotion to duty for granted and give them the credit, the respect and the financial rewards they so richly deserve.