The Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association (APNA) has placed its first 76 student nurses into aged care as part of a new program to recruit nurses into the residential aged care sector.
The Commonwealth-funded scheme aims to place 140 students during its first month, eventually delivering clinical placement experiences in aged care for 1,800 second- and third-year nursing students – nearly 13% of the additional 14,000 nurses needed by the sector to meet the recommendations made by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety.
The second focus of the program will be the development and hosting of an online aged care knowledge hub to provide all nursing students, clinical facilitators, and placement providers with resources to support quality placement experiences.
APNA President, Ms Karen Booth, explained that the program will ultimately help aged care providers meet the commitment for all facilities to have RNs onsite and on duty 24 hours per day, 7 days per week as of 1 July 2023.
“The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety clearly identified that aged care service delivery was well below standard with our older Australians paying the price for poor quality care,” she said.
“We need a sustainable pipeline of qualified registered aged care nurses now to meet the health care needs of the future, and providing a pathway for nurses, especially new graduates, into aged care, is a much better and more sustainable option than recruiting health professionals from overseas.
“More nursing students must be given the chance to experience aged care so that we can build that workforce, and clinical placements provide an opportunity to enhance and shape a student’s attitudes and learning experiences.”
Key features of APNA’s aged care placement program include:
- Direct supervision from an APNA-employed Registered Nurse clinical facilitator, to ensure minimal disruption to the existing aged care workforce and operations, and to provide clear direction and close supervision for students.
- Support for higher-level nursing skill acquisition, including nursing leadership and care coordination, chronic disease management, complex care (wound management, enteral feeding, ostomy care, pain and medication management, palliation) and head-to-toe assessments (including neurological, cardiovascular, respiratory, and urinary).
- Access to best-practice Aged Care Nursing resources: APNA is developing an Aged Care Knowledge hub that will be freely available to anyone working in aged care across Australia.
- The opportunity to influence perceptions and career decisions about aged care.
APNA will work collaboratively with universities to map unique curriculum learning outcomes to the placement opportunity, to enable a broader scope of nursing practice, rather than limiting placements to first-year students, who usually enter aged care to practise basic nursing skills.
“This enables the opportunity to include chronic disease management and complex care, facilitating second- and third-year nursing student learning needs which is more aligned with the work of the registered nurse in the aged care sector,” APNA said.