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Post-grad qualifications to bring “lifetime wage premium” for nurses

Nurses may be able to double their income by taking on further study, with workforce shortages predicted for the near future.
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There was no definition of nursing that I could see anywhere in the Deloitte report.
The report suggests that nurses will increasingly be called upon to have high-level qualifications and work in leadership roles. Presumably, this means there will also be a need for more lower level staff to lead. Will these be registered nurses or will they be nursing assistants? There used to be abundant registered nurses in aged care. This is no longer the case and many, many thousands of registered nurses have been shed from this sector and replaced with lesser educated staff. Hospitals are getting larger but fewer exist. Where will 300,000+ nurses all work?
What this comment does not address is the issue of how the profession of nursing is likely to evolve in the next decade. Any assumptions on staff requirements need to take into account the accelerated use of machine learning and AI and the impacts this will have on health care decision-making.
The question to be asked is what will a nurse actually look like in the future? Maybe, nursing will be a very different and highly specialised profession where much of today’s routine work is conducted by less regulated staff assisted by adjunctive technology and who are not nurses. If this is the case, it will mean far fewer nurses will be required.
Lifelong learning will clearly be essential as it is for all professions going forward.
Maybe we need to think this through a bit more …