Page 627 - Week 03 - Thursday, 15 March 2007
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Mr Speaker, ensuring the supply of qualified staff and retaining those staff is a critical component in the planning for any future health provision in the territory. It is something that this government has invested significant resources in since coming to government. We know that the demands being placed on the public health system will continue to grow. We know that there are international, national and local shortages across the health work force and we know that we have to be proactive in addressing these work force issues in order to be able to provide into the future the health system that we have now.
Our first graduate doctors will graduate at the end of next year from the ANU medical school. I think in the next couple of years we will be exporting more doctors to other jurisdictions across Australia than we can employ ourselves. We have already graduated 21 physiotherapists, eight dieticians and 14 pharmacists from courses at the University of Canberra. As I said, the first graduate doctors will graduate at the end of next year.
We have also been looking at diversifying the work force. For example, under the previous minister we established the role of nurse practitioner. In fact, as we speak, we have several nurse practitioners employed in the health sector. We have also worked with the Canberra Institute of Technology to develop an enrolled nurse medication administration course and a certificate IV course for allied health assistants across the three disciplines of occupational therapy assistance, physiotherapy assistance and speech pathology assistance, all of which have proven to be extremely popular.
Also, in last year’s budget we invested around $4 million to support further work force initiatives, particularly around retention of our current work force. We have developed career pathways for our nursing and midwifery work force and established clinical development nursing and midwifery positions within the service to support new employees, particularly new graduates. We are already seeing some of the benefits of that effort in our separation rates for health professionals, which have decreased significantly from 15.9 per cent in July 2004 to 10 per cent during December 2005-January 2006. Seventy-nine per cent of nurses who have taken part in the nursing and midwifery scholarship scheme, which we commenced in 2001, are still working within our service.
The budget certainly looked at initiatives such as scholarships in order to support our current work force and ensure that we can retain them into the future. Our separation rates are already proving that some of those structures are effective. Also, we have the EBA coming up for our allied health staff and nursing staff. Our VMOs have been dealt with, as have salaried medical officers. We will have those discussions with our nursing and midwifery work force and our allied health professionals.
Certainly, the view of this government is that we will need to pay rates of pay that make our salaries competitive with those of other jurisdictions. They already are competitive but we need to maintain them, otherwise we will see those separation rates increase. All health professionals are in an international market, getting snapped up across the world. If you have a health professional qualification, you really can live and work anywhere you like. So we do have to be on the front foot, ensuring that we
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