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About RCNA
Royal College of Nursing, Australia (RCNA) is the peak professional body for nurses. As a member you can influence a range of local and national issues by getting involved in the activities of RCNA. Read more. |
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Get published with RCNA!
RCNA is currently calling for contributions for the December issue of Connections magazine. Do you have a clinical piece, a research summary, a profile, a report on a new innovation, or a first-person nursing story you'd like to share? Read more! |
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Not an either/or question
Since experiencing the International Council of Nurses Congress and Council of National Representatives meeting in Durban earlier this month, I’ve been thinking about the similarities among nurses despite the wide variation among their practice settings.
There were approximately 5,600 participants at the Congress, and it was great to be able to discuss topics of mutual interest with colleagues from all corners of the world. Despite the gaps in service that many of the nations represented there experience, so many of the topics of conversation over meals or in seminars were familiar. Patient safety, nurse safety, primary health care, human and material resource deficits, and how nurses must continue to lobby to be involved in all levels of health care delivery and policy formulation were frequently discussed.
A deeply moving presentation by Miriam Were on human rights captured a great deal of attention. She proposed that we need to ensure that nurses don’t become barriers to access to health care, and that we should start thinking of registered nurses as the “generals” in nursing care and assistants (however titled) as the “foot soldiers”.
From her perspective it is not an either/or question, but rather about adding to the capacity of nurses to provide the care that is needed. While her talk raised some debate, her examples of places in the world where, without the assistant level there would be no health care, were certainly sobering. And nurses in Australia are certainly aware of places where this is true in our own country. Substitution is certainly not appropriate, but we need to, at least, keep an open mind.
Dr Stephanie Fox-Young FRCNA
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