In recent years, there's been a lot of talk about nurses, nursing shortages, and the working conditions of nurses. These were all talking points before the global pandemic and during it, all the issues that faced nursing were brought to the forefront, not just in Australia, but in healthcare systems around the world.
Not only are there too few nurses in the country, but there's also a lot of discontent in the profession, which is just one of the causes that leads to a shortage. Here, we'll look at nursing in Australia, the conditions nurses have to work in, why there's a shortage of nurses, and look at their overall job satisfaction.
Is It Good to Work as a Nurse in Australia?
Nursing is a good job. It's not necessarily an easy job, but it's generally considered a good job. Not only are nurses essential workers, but they're essential healthcare workers so they're directly responsible for the well-being and care of their patients.
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Obviously, there are more than just nurses working in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare facilities, but nurses are definitely an integral part of patient care and whenever you're unlucky enough to find yourself in a hospital, you'll likely see your nurses more frequently than you see your doctor.
We're obviously not suggesting that the doctors aren't doing any work, we're just indicating that the nursing staff tends to have a closer relationship with patients than doctors because of the increased time they spend with them.
Morally speaking, nursing is a noble profession that helps people, but whether or not it's good in terms of their working environment, pay, and respect remains to be seen.
Are Nurses Paid Well in Australia?
On paper, nurses' salaries are pretty competitive. The average salary tends to line up with their education level and other workers with a similar level of training would be quite happy with the salaries they receive.
Of course, salary isn't just about the qualifications you have, it's also about the work you do and the conditions you have to work under. The harder the job, the more you should theoretically be paid. In theory, this works, but in practice, we reckon a lot of nurses would say that they're not paid enough for the work they have to do.
In case you were wondering, the average salary for nurses in Australia is around $80,000 a year, which equates to slightly over $40 an hour. Many nurses will earn more than their stated salaries because of shift work and overtime and the more experience they have, the more they can expect to earn.
Newly-qualified nurses usually earn closer to $77,000 a year but the higher end of the pay scale is closer to $100,000 a year for those with seniority and many years of experience.
Are Nurses Respected in Australia?
Just like anybody else, we can easily wax lyrical about nurses all day and the outstanding and essential role they perform for healthcare systems around the nation.
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Few people would say that they don't respect nurses and I think it's fair to say that most people do respect the work that nurses do and would almost always go on the record to sing their praises. In fact, the Roy Morgan Image of Professions Survey has seen nurses picked as the most trusted profession in Australia for nearly 25 years!
As mentioned earlier, they're essential workers and an essential part of healthcare and we and many others respect that. However, words are cheap and we could debate for a very long time whether or not nurses get the respect they deserve when it comes to how they're treated, the working environment they're given, and how they're remunerated for the work that they have to do.
Nurses are respected as much as a lot of other essential workers; with cheap words. They can be applauded for their hard work during a pandemic but we believe if you ask most nurses whether or not they feel they're being respected by the system and organisations within which they work and they'd tell you a different story.
Why Is There a Shortage of Nurses in Australia?
The simplest explanation for the nursing shortage in Australia is that more nurses are leaving the profession than nurses joining it.
There are two main sources of new nurses: newly-qualified Australian nurses and foreign nurses migrating to Australia. There are also two main ways that nurses leave the profession: through retirement or by quitting their jobs.
In both instances, the first example is easier to calculate and account for. Domestically, we know how many students are enrolled on nursing courses and can safely assume from historical data how many of them will make their way into the profession.
The same is true for nurses leaving the profession as they reach retirement age. We know what this age is and we know the ages of the nurses currently working.
Knowing both of these makes it somewhat easier for healthcare systems to know how many nurses they have and how many they'll need.
The problem comes from nurses quitting their jobs. There are many reasons an individual may choose to quit their job, but with nursing, unhappiness with working conditions and the job itself is one of the most cited reasons and we can see from the data that dissatisfaction among nurses is having an impact on staffing and the quality of care health providers can give.
Sometimes people just leave their jobs because they want to go do something else, but dissatisfaction is clearly one of the biggest factors and that's a problem!
Why Did the Nursing Shortage in Australia Start?
It'd be quite easy to point at the global pandemic as a reason and it's definitely a contributing factor to dissatisfaction among nurses and the number of nurses quitting. We've clearly seen that the pandemic was one of the factors that affected the working environment for nurses in hospitals, led to burnout, and saw job satisfaction at an all-time low.
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However, the nursing shortage in Australia had started before the pandemic on the other side of the equation: the number of nurses joining the profession. With fewer nursing-school graduates and a reduction in the number of foreign nurses migrating to Australia, there were nursing shortages a long time before COVID.
There's also an ageing population in Australia so the demand for nurses went up but the supply didn't. Staffing issues in hospitals were already making it harder for your average nurse to provide adequate care to patients and the last thing we needed was for the situation to get worse.
Then the pandemic hit and nurses who were already working in understaffed departments were suddenly required to work more, for longer hours, and in more stressful situations. It was already hard enough to provide quality care to patients in any hospital, let alone on the back of a long shift. This became even harder when the number of patients was suddenly building up and filling up intensive care units.
Nurse satisfaction was already low before the pandemic and it definitely didn't get any better during it.
Why Are So Many Nurses in Australia Leaving their Jobs?
Basically, nurses are unhappy and you can't really blame them. There aren't enough of them, they're being asked to do more work, their working conditions have worsened, and their pay isn't increasing to reflect this.
The nurses leaving the profession are doing so because they want higher pay but this doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that they're greedy; they want to be paid fairly for the work they're doing. Satisfaction among nurses would be just as likely to increase if the quality of their work environment improved instead of a pay increase.
They also regularly mention the work environment, stress, and work-life balance. Many nurses speak about burnout and it's safe to say that if they were happy, fewer would be quitting.
Of course, you could also say that other jobs are enticing them away from nursing, but given how often unhappiness is cited as the reason for quitting, we really need to consider the main driving factor behind the issue.
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What Other Factors Are Impacting Australia's Nurses?
The general unhappiness in nursing is one thing, but there's also the specific impact of the pandemic. For nurses, this affected their happiness as they needed to work longer shifts, and long hours, and, for many, be there on the front-line witnessing more chaos and distressing scenes of the impact of the virus, especially in the early days.
Then there are the other services provided by the nursing staff that were understaffed as nurses were taken to deal with the pandemic. With nurses returning to treatment backlogs and understaffed departments, can you blame them for being unhappy with their working conditions?
All of these factors compound, of course. Fewer nurses mean more understaffing, which means worse working conditions, which means more unhappy nurses, which means more nurses quitting.
It's all a vicious cycle and some significant changes will be needed to break it and get us back to a place where nursing staff are happy with their jobs, their working conditions, and their pay.
It's not just unhappiness that's making nurses leave the profession, though. We also mentioned Australia's ageing population. This is a two-fold issue for nursing in the country because it means there's an increase in the number of nurses reaching retirement age, but there's also an increase in the number of people who require healthcare.
Naturally, healthcare requirements increase with age so the demand for nurses has gone up but so has the number of nurses leaving.
The solution will have to be something that makes nursing more appealing to those thinking about entering the profession as well as to those in other countries. However, you can't convince more people to become nurses by just leaving the job in its current state!
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