‘We will pay their entire HECS debt’: Free uni degrees for Victorian nurses, midwives

The Victorian government will pay for the degrees of more than 10,000 nursing and midwifery students as part of a $270 million initiative to help boost staffing across the state’s strained health system.

All new domestic students entering nursing courses in Victoria next year and in 2024 will receive a scholarship of $16,500 to cover the cost of the degree. The opposition will support the policy, which the government will put in place immediately, before November’s state election.

Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas and Daniel Andrews make the funding announcement on Sunday.Credit: Penny Stephens

Victoria needs 65,000 more health and community care workers in the next three years to meet demand and replace people retiring, a skills plan released last week by the state government forecasts.

Under the funding package outlined by Premier Daniel Andrews on Sunday, students will receive $9000 while they study and the remaining $7500 if they work in Victorian public health services for two years.

Scholarships will also be provided to 150 postgraduate midwifery students to help them continue working as nurses while they study.

“We will pay their entire HECS debt,” the premier told reporters and scores of enthusiastic nurses and midwives gathered at the offices of the nursing and midwifery union in Melbourne.

Under the plan, further scholarships will be provided for enrolled nurses to become registered nurses, with funding available for post-graduate nurses to start speciality studies in areas such as intensive care, emergency, paediatrics and cancer care.

Andrews said additional funding would mean more than 20,000 current and future nurses in Victoria would have their university courses funded or be upskilled.

“All the roles in our health system are critically important, but giving people a pathway and giving people that sense of progression is critically important as well,” he said. “We do know that cost can be a barrier to people undertaking that further study.

“Year 11 and 12 students who are thinking about what they might like to do as a career, they can choose nursing, free of charge, a full scholarship covering every dollar of their HECS.”

Speaking on Sunday morning, opposition health spokeswoman Georgie Crozier said Victoria had “a health crisis that is worsening by the day”. She said the premier was making Sunday’s announcement after years of seeing the system deteriorate.

“Daniel Andrews has had eight years” to address problems in the health sector, she said, and was making Sunday’s announcement on the eve of a state election campaign.

If Liberal leader Matthew Guy won November’s election, Crozier said, “we’d match this announcement”.

And she said the money from cancelling the Suburban Rail Loop’s first stage of railway line from Cheltenham to Box Hill – which Andrews said on Sunday would cost about $34 billion to build – would be redirected to the health system.

Domestic nursing students who enter their courses in 2023 and 2024 will be eligible for a $16,500 scholarship to pay for their HECS if they stay in the public health system.

“We’ll be putting every cent of that money into the health system, whether it’s recruiting nurses, whether it’s rebuilding crumbling hospitals around the state, whether it’s building new hospitals,” she said.

The announcement of the plan was made at the Elizabeth Street offices of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, strong Labor Party supporters.

The union’s state secretary, Lisa Fitzpatrick, said the funding would make it easier to access education for existing nurses and midwives who needed refresher training, and for those who had allowed their registration to lapse.

“Next year’s students will be tomorrow’s emergency and critical care nurses, maternal and child health nurses, school nurses, aged care nurses, theatre nurses, mental health nurses, acute and community nurses and midwives,” Fitzpatrick said.

The nursing union and the Coalition went to war last time the latter was in power in Victoria, from 2010 to 2014, over a key issue of minimum compulsory levels of nursing staff in hospitals.

At Sunday’s event, the nursing union handed out a leaked 2011 cabinet document from the then-Baillieu government that recommended reducing or removing nurse-patient ratios, despite the Coalition promising while in opposition to retain them.

“Nurses and midwives have difficulty trusting the Victorian opposition because [of this promise],” Fitzpatrick said. “Within six months they broke that promise by trying to replace thousands of nurses and midwives with cheaper unqualified assistants. Two-thirds of those Liberal politicians who fought so hard to get rid of nurses and midwives during our 2011-12 enterprise bargaining negotiations are still there.”

The opposition declined to respond to the criticism.

The Victorian Healthcare Association – which represents hospitals, community health and aged care services – also welcomed the new funding.

“We are particularly pleased with the financial incentives for nurses who choose to work in the public health system for two years, and with the support for 8500 nurses to learn new skills,” said the association’s deputy chief executive, Juan Paolo Legaspi. “We have a severe shortage of healthcare workers in Victoria right now, so we desperately need a range of strategies to increase our health workforce immediately as well as in the longer term.”

He said the federal government also needed to make it easier for qualified healthcare workers to move to Australia to fill immediate gaps. “If we want to keep our public health services afloat, we will need a combination of strategies to train and recruit enough people to meet this goal.”

Australasian College for Emergency Medicine Victorian chair Dr Belinda Hibble said the move was an important step in rebuilding the state’s nursing workforce after the pandemic’s impact.

Hibble said that as well as supporting people to enter nursing, it was vital more training opportunities were made available to build skills and expertise within emergency departments.

“Providing emergency care, despite our current very significant challenges, is an incredibly rewarding area of healthcare,” she said. “This announcement will support nursing staff who may be balancing mortgages, family commitments and the rising cost of living to access these important professional development opportunities.”

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