Old Wounds Begin To Heal As Pioneering Nurses Mark Their First Five Years
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday May 12, 2006
MORE than 10 years after the first controversial pilot program and five years since their official entry into the health system, nurse practitioners are still making waves among medicine's more conservative physicians.
Sixty-five nurse practitioners now work in the state's health system. They are diagnosing, treating and monitoring chronic diseases, and ordering diagnostic tests, accepting referrals and referring patients to other health professionals.And despite dire predictions from doctors' groups - especially the Australian Medical Association - the sky has not fallen. Accused of "dumbing down health", described as "lower skilled and lesser trained", nurse practitioners have also been painted as creating a "lower quality health system" by an unapologetic medical association.But research from the University of Western Sydney school of nursing, coinciding with today's fifth anniversary of their official introduction to the health system, paints a different picture.Jann Foster has been charting the progress of the pioneering nurse practitioners, and has found that for all the opposition there is also a sense that old obstructions are finally breaking down."Over time as trust develops ... the obstruction tends to decrease and medical practitioners begin to see the benefits of the role rather than feeling threatened by it," said Ms Foster, a nurse and PhD researcher.Australia lags way behind countries like the US, where nurse practitioners have been working alongside doctors since the 1960s, and now number 150,000.NSW was the first state in Australia to consider nurses taking on advanced clinical roles, running a series of pilot projects in 1994. But it was a rocky road. One early nurse practitioner reported that a GP had put up a petition in the small country town in which they both worked, asking patients whether they wanted to be cared for by a nurse practitioner or a doctor.It is a different story now, with many medical specialists acknowledging the value of nurse practitioners, and the NSW Government extending prescribing rights to senior nurses in certain specialties.One of the state's first nurse practitioners, Jane O'Connell, based in the emergency department at Hornsby Hospital, said she was greeting the fifth anniversary with mixed feelings. She said many nurses had been turned off from expanding their practice by the backlash."We need an injection of funds to be able to create more positions - in mental health, aged care and emergency departments, which are the three health hotbeds we deal with on a daily basis."
© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald
