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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (27 March) . . Page.. 974 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

The question of short shifts is obviously extremely problematic for the nurses in the hospital. If you are serious about reducing the stress on nurses in the hospital, and you want to make the profession more attractive, why would you make, through alteration of conditions, the situation more stressful? What I and other members of this place are hearing quite clearly is that short shifts mean that other nurses, full time nurses, have to carry the load. It is as simple as that. As a result of this offer, we are seeing additional stress being placed on nurses who are now in a situation of moving out of the profession. I do not blame them-no-one would blame them-for doing that. This offer is going to increase that stress.

I think it is useful to understand how the job of nurses has changed over the last 20 to 30 years. This relates acuity and that is why this concept is now being brought into the discussion. We understand that what happens in our hospitals is different. We used to have a situation where patients would come into a hospital because they were sick and they would stay there until they were better. That does not happen now. We have early discharge. People are moved out of the hospital quickly. Obviously, the workload of nurses has increased because the people they are looking after are sicker.

So the whole concept of acuity is important and it is being acknowledged by this government. In fact, I noticed today in question time that Mr Moore, in answer to Mr Osborne's question about parents who were very distressed to find their sick child could not be accommodated in the hospital, made a comment about the acuity load and how the nurses, much to their credit, were actually picking up a greater acuity level than they should be. I have been told nurses have been given a direction to go over the limit of acuity anyway, which is not only offensive to the concept of duty of care but is inconsistent with the agreement. That is what I have been told and I would be interested to know if Mr Moore wants to deny it.

If we know that nurses are being asked to work over that acuity level already, surely we should be very concerned about what is actually going in the hospital and why the situation has got to this point. Surely we should be very concerned about an offer which is going to increase stress.

Let us talk about acuity. I understand that most patients have to be incubated before they are admitted to the Intensive Care Unit. So you have got this narrowing definition of why people will be in ICU. I understand there is a ratio of one to one in ICU. What does that mean for the other people who are no longer able to go into ICU? They are in the normal ward where the staff ratio is much lower. So you have people who are critically ill in the other wards that do not have that one to one care.

This is a really serious situation, and it is no wonder that the nurses are so angry about the way they have been treated. Not only have they been told that they do not have the right to negotiate around these conditions, but the minister concerned has said that this large amount of taxpayers' money which his government decided should go to nurses maybe will not go to health at all. I heard Mr Moore say, "I'm sure my colleagues would have somewhere to spend that money." How does this government make decisions about spending public money if you can just take it away like that because people will not play the game the way you want to play it?

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