“Ratios, ratios, ratios. Everybody will tell you that.” This was the response of aged care resident Merle Mitchell earlier this year at the royal commission when asked to nominate one thing she would change in the sector given the chance. ...
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Nurse numbers disputed during UK election campaign
Nurses are once again front and centre during a contentious UK election campaign. This time because of dubious promises made by the prime minister, Boris Johnson. A key pledge from the Tory manifesto was the introduction of 50,000 extra nurses for ...
More »How would you respond to a patient who wants to die?
It has been six months since the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act was passed into law in Victoria and the idea of state sanctioned euthanasia has been a topic continuously debated in state parliaments across the land. The full effect of ...
More »Caring for the homeless: video
https://youtu.be/DtQxJY3_74Q Managing your own health while navigating the health system can be hard enough for most of us, but imagine having to do it with the added burden of being homeless. That’s the scenario facing clients of Erin Longbottom, ...
More »From the operating theatre to the flight deck: video
https://youtu.be/HtMLcz1cbII Making the transition from nurse to commercial pilot might seem an unusual career trajectory, but that’s the path Geoff Hay took after training as a nurse at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital in the 1980s and working in operating ...
More »New research aims to tackle suicide in pregnant women
Suicide is the leading cause of maternal death for Australian women during pregnancy and a new research project is being funded to develop ways to help this vulnerable group. Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, James Cook University, and service provider and ...
More »‘Financial viability is a means to an end in aged care; it is not an end in itself’: Royal commission
The royal commission finished its Hobart hearing with some ideas as to how better governance can go some way to fixing the poor practices currently seen across the sector. In his concluding remarks counsel assisting Peter Rozen alluded to the ...
More »Public health physician discusses how hospitals can tackle climate change
This week climate change has been thrust to the forefront of national debate with catastrophic fires engulfing parts of the nation. Australian summers already have devastating health effects on the community each year and the health system comes under increasing ...
More »Royal commission interim report: Sector reacts
The royal commission's interim report, titled simply Neglect, paints a grim picture of a sector devoid of caring and emotion and concerned only with the idea of itself as an “industry” that has “consumers” whose value is “defined by the amount of funding ...
More »What is forensic nursing?
Nursing specialities are increasingly being recognised with individual training programs and diplomas – one such field is forensic nursing. The word forensic brings to mind American procedurals like Law and Order or CSI, but the word forensic simply means ‘related to law’. The roots ...
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