Here is a graph that tells a story or two.
The Australian nursing workforce age spread.
Source: Nurse and Midwife – Registration Data Table – March 2012
And our bright young nurses? Number of nurses less than 30 years of age = 1,837.
Four point six eight percent of the current nursing workforce.
Yes, that is Australia wide.
Can you run for parliament ….please? We need people with your raw, factual and honest opinions up there.
Let us also compare the average age of graduating nurses too. Newly graduated nurses are generally in their early to mid forties so we also need to looking at making nursing a valuable career for young people. Many are using their nursing degree as a stepping stone to another career or are leaving nursing within five years due to intolerable working conditions like inequities in rostering, heavy workloads and the dumbing down of nursing knowledge by nursing leadership to use scripting of activities or even worse not enabling ward staff input in how to make improvements to client care, improving educational opportunities or even ensuring supplies like tea/ coffee for clients being available. Job satisfaction will improve if floor staff are involved in decisions!
Agree with stats being in the majority group (just). What I find jaw dropping and possibly a bit sad is that there are actually still nurses registered in their 70′s. Hoping that won’t be me in 20 years time…as much as I love being a nurse.
I agree with your stats…or at least I did. Til I read an article in the latest Royal College for Nurses Australia Magazine, it stated that there will be early redundancy or retirement packages offered to the older nurses to make way for the Graduate nurses coming through the universities. Apparently the hospitals are nable to place them in their graduate year. What are your thoughts on this?
Interesting thought.
Two things come to mind about this.
1) the very large impact that the ageing population is about to have on the health system. An impact that will include complex and high care requirements (eg Alzheimer’s).
Hospitals are going to really need to drastically increase capacity (and therefore number of nurses) to keep up with the communities healthcare needs, and I imagine this will absorb many of the Graduate nurses.
2) If this is not the case and they decide not to increase capacity (woe betide them) and begin to ‘clear out the old-wood to make way for the new’ I would have concerns that there could potentially be an enormous amount of collective experience and dare I say wisdom walking out the door without the opportunity to hand over their knowledge.
Mind you, if they start waving a decent redundancy package in front of most nurses, I would not blame them one little bit.
an article by Prof Colligon, shows that over the last 3-4 decades public hospital bed numbers have decreased from around 5 per thousand of population to barely 2.2 beds per thousand of population.
Governments covertly would prefer that we used the much more expensive private system