Shortage of ‘Nursing Practitioners’ in Australian Rural Area

Health workforce
Essay
System04104

Shortage of ‘Nursing Practitioners’ in Australian Rural Area
Lack of access to primary and preventive care services by people living in Australian
rural areas remains one of the main problems of Australian health care services, even the
government take several workforce initiatives in past. No one can deny that nurse
practitioners play an essential role in the nation's health care system by serving people.
Nursing practitioners serve as an alternative of medical physicians in scarcity of doctors or
physicians in both rural and urban areas (Campell & Merwin, 2009). Many such problems
arise in rural areas, where people fighting with lack of medical resources, equipment,
medicines, doctors, and even some people fighting with the unavailability of the hospital in
their locality. The rural nursing shortage is a challenge for the Australian government with
the shortage of other medical facilities in the rural and remote areas of the country. However,
the government initiated a large number of programs to fight with the shortage of healthcare
practitioners in rural areas, but still the Australian government is facing challenges to
eliminate this problem at the root level. In order to remove workforce shortage problem in
nursing practices, the Australian government introduced a number of initiative programs such
as regulatory restrictions and incentive payment systems (Buerhus, Donelan, Ulrich, Norman,
& Dittus, 2005). Some of the programs especially focus on increasing the numbers of nurses
and healthcare practitioners and remote in rural areas of the country. Practice nursing in
Australia usually has been a way of income for nursing practitioners through which nurses
have been accommodating for family obligations by engaging themselves in part-time work,
which has not involved in shift work. Consequently, there has been a lack of special skills
nurses who believe to work in general practice. One of the main problems is that most of the
nurses do not involve in any formal education to do such type of healthcare service work.
Nursing workforce in Australia till 2016
There are 311,697 primary health care nurses (including midwives) working
in Australian primary healthcare service till 2016, which is more than the nurses were
working in 2013. The number of nurses in 2013 was 292,845. In 2016, the number of
nurses increased by 0.4 % per annum. This compares to the total nursing workforce
including midwives in 2016 (311,697) which has increased by approx. 6.7% since
2013, with an annual average increase of 2.1% (Department of Health Australia,
2016).

Fig: Total number of nurses and midwives in Australia till 2016
(Source: Australian Government, Department of Health, 2016-17)
In the Primary Health Care Nurse workforce, there were 217 Nurse
Practitioners working in primary health care in 2016, compared with 135 in 2013.
Fig: Total number of Registered and Employed Nurses in Australia till 2016
(Source: Australian Government, Department of Health, 2016-17)
According to the Australian Government Department of Health, total
Registered Nurses till 2016, in Australia were 1,417 and there were 1,340 nurses were
employed in the country. There are only 498 nurses registered for the Australian
healthcare service program in 3 years after 2013, where the number of employed
nurses increases by only 567 nurses. This shows the unavailability and slow rate of
unemployment in healthcare service in Australia (National Health Workforce, 2009).
Even though the Australian government initiates a number of healthcare program to
attract people towards the health care service job, but could not succeed to attract
candidate for future nursing work.
Geographically Distribution of Nurses
Most of the Australian primary health care nurses (63.5%) were located in urban areas
or in big cities of the country. If we consider the Inner Regional area, the numbers of total
primary healthcare nurses are 18.4% that is too low in comparison to major cities.

Fig: Total number of nurses and midwives in Australia till 2016
(Source: Australian Government, Department of Health, 2016-17)
If we compare with the rural areas, only 18.1% nurses working in rural areas. If we
compared with the number of nurses in 2013, the percentage of the workforce in the remote
area has remained almost same, while 71.5% of the workforce (210,994) working in the
developed area, it means there are a large number of the workforce employed in major cities
rather than rural areas or remote areas. This shows the unavailability of the number of nurses
in Australian rural areas. The distribution of nurses geographically not suited for Australian
Population because the availability of nurses according to the rural population density is too
low. One of the major problems behind facing scarcity of nurses in rural areas is no one
wants to work in the less-developed and ill-equipped area (Fitzgerald, 2007). The
unavailability of resources and poor working conditions for females in rural areas are two
main reasons behind the unavailability of the health workforce in Australia.
Fig: Some Facts about Australian Nursing in Rural Areas in 2016
(Source: Australian Government, Department of Health, 2016-17)