Page 1568 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007
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achieve significant efficiencies in this agreement. Probably the most significant reforms in nursing are now available through the agreement to ensure that our hospitals continue their drive for efficiency in the delivery of health care services and that we can continue to work towards reducing our costs to within 10 per cent of the national average.
Those conditions, some of which I think many governments before this government have sought, include flexibility around shift arrangements. The approach we have taken has been a bit different, particularly from that of the previous government, which sought to impose a shift regime which was very unpopular with the nurses. What we have done through this agreement is to protect the 8-8-10 roster. We accept that that needs to be the centrepiece of any shift arrangements at the hospital. But this agreement gives us the flexibility to recognise that nursing workloads and the desires of nurses have changed over time and it gives us the opportunity to negotiate shorter shifts. Shifts will now be able to go from four hours to up to 12 hours, depending on management and nursing staff agreeing. That is a significant gain in terms of some of the restraint that there has been previously through agreements which have really only allowed the delivery of an 8-8-10 roster.
The agreement also allows for a new classification of nurses, what we will call assistants in nursing. They will join the classifications of the nursing profession. These will be entry-level positions that will support, say, the enrolled nurse and the registered nurse as well. Our idea is to ensure that our professional nurses, our degree-trained nurses and enrolled nurses that are diploma trained, no longer will need to be weighed down with jobs that may and can be done by others. The assistants in nursing concession is a significant one by the nurses, who have previously not welcomed any diversification of the workforce in this area.
We have also been able to address an overtime payment which has acted as a disincentive to full-time nursing, the overtime rates paid to part-timers who chose to work full-time hours. That has been addressed in this agreement as well. We have reached agreement on workload management and a monitoring regime around nursing hours and patients on particular days.
In total, the savings that will be achieved through the implementation of a number of these new flexibilities in the agreement will allow us to deliver the increases that the nurses have been seeking. We have stayed true to the government’s objective of a 12 per cent pay rise. It will be paid in three instalments over a 30-month period. The agreement is shorter than others that have been negotiated, but this agreement pays for itself in the sense of the productivity savings that we have achieved. It has been the government’s strategy in bargaining since we commenced this round of negotiations that, if there were to be wage increases above three per cent per annum, they needed to come paid from within. This agreement certainly is one that does that.
There are improved conditions for midwives employed in the Canberra midwifery program. (Time expired.)
MR SPEAKER: A supplementary question, Ms MacDonald?
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