Shortage of Nurses in Australia - Causes, Effects, and Solutions

RUNNING HEAD: SHORTAGE OF NURSES IN AUSTRALIA 1
Shortage of Nurses in Australia
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Shortage of Nurses in Australia
BACKGROUND
According to the statistics published in the year 2015 by the Australia Institute of Health
and Welfare, there were only 307,000 nurses together with the midwives in Australia. This is
however in contrary to the population of the country (Cheng, Bartram, Karimi, & Leggat,
2016).According to the same report. There was a total population of 24 million as by February
2016 and this had the potential of subjecting the country’s healthcare system under a lot of stress
(Aggar, Gordon, Thomas, Wadsworth, & Bloomfield, 2018). The Government had earlier on in
2014 predicted that the Australia future health workforce was in need of more than 123,000
nurses come the year 2030.
The Australian government always checks different industries to identify any shortages
of the skills in particular industries. According to a report published by the Australia’s future
health workforce, it was established that the nursing industry would have a shortage of 85,000
nurses by the year 2025 (Timilsina Bhandari, Xiao, & Belan, 2014).This number was however
expected to grow to 123,000 as of 2030.The government then recommended that the nursing
profession be listed at the skilled occupation list which should subsequently be filled up by the
immigrants who apply through the temporary work visa subclass 457.
The study established that shortage in skills usually occur whenever there is a mismatch
between needs of the population and the available nursing staff. This has subsequent effects on
the economy and the general quality of life of the Australians (Whitehead & Myers, 2016). The
key reason as to the shortage of nurses in Australia is the higher ageing population that are living
with very chronic and complex health conditions. By the time the nursing report on workforce

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sustainability was being undertaken, it was confirmed that the population health trends as well as
the ageing nursing workforce would eventually lead to a shortage of nurses in Australia (Ng
Chok, Mannix, Dickson, & Wilkes, 2018). The key areas that would be affected with the
shortage of nurses include the aged care as well as mental health .It was also predicted that the
focus on future healthcare would be health promotion ,monitoring of chronic diseases and finally
the care of patients suffering from very complex health conditions.
There are different reasons as to why there is generally a low number of nurses and
midwives in Australia. According to the SBS, one of the core reasons is the fact that there are
very few professionals who enter the country and this is due to complications surrounding
obtaining of visas. There are only 457 visas preserved for the employers to only sponsor
temporary skilled overseas employees (Reid, Jones, Hurst, & Anderson, 2018). According to the
same research by the SBS, there were only 1879 nurses who were registered on 457 visas as of
September 2017.This was the least number as from the year 2009 (Tuckett, Winters-Chang,
Bogossian, & Wood, 2014).The low number of the professionals is due to the fact that the
Australian Government want to upskill the local talent so that they can rely on them in future.
To curb the nursing shortages, the Australian government should come up with strategies
so as to avoid stress on the healthcare or the nursing industry. One of the initiatives is to allow
more overseas professionals to come in and boost our local based team of nurses. Setting up of
more nursing schools is another strategy to improve on the number of nurses.The commonwealth
government should also provide better remuneration to the nurses so that more nurses can be
enrolled at the nursing schools (Allen, Holland, & Reynolds, 2014). Within this paper, there will
be an analysis to the possible causes of low number of nurses in Australia, the effects, how to
solve the mystery and the potential barriers to implementation of the strategies.

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PROBLEM STATEMENT
According to studies, the number of nurses remain relatively low in Australia. This has
general negative impact on the Australia’s healthcare system. As compared to the 24 million
population of Australia, 307,000 nurses are very few to meet the World Health Organization
recommendation of the patient nurse ratio. This imbalance leads to stress among the nurses as
they strive to meet all the patients’ needs and this eventually leads to poor services. There should
be efforts from the commonwealth government to make sure that the nurse patient ratio
recommended by the World Health Organization is achieved.
PURPOSE OF THE CHANGE PROPOSAL
This change proposal has different objectives. One of the objective is to find out why
there is a shortage of nurses in Australia. Once the reasons have been established, there should be
efforts to come up with strategies that can improve on the number of nurses in Australia. The
proposal change will examine barriers in implementing the strategies and finally how the barriers
could be overcome.
PICOT
PICOT stands for Population, intervention, comparison, Outcome and finally Time .In
this change proposal, the population refers to the nurses and the Intervention include training
opportunities, providing scholarships and finally juggling between education and work. The
outcome in this proposal is having an increased number of nurses in Australia. The expected time
to reach the recommended time of the number of nurses is 2030.This means that it should be