Nurses and Midwives

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (15:16): I rise, as did the member for Hurtle Vale, to talk about the magnificent nurses and midwives we have in this state. I commend the member for Hurtle Vale for every year bringing to parliament a range of different nurses and midwives, leaders in the profession across the state, so that we can mark in parliament the tremendous work that they do. We also mark every year International Nurses Day and International Day of the Midwife.

All of us know how important nurses and midwives are to South Australia. All of us have either been to hospital or had friends and family in hospital, aged care or primary care, and we know the importance of nurses and midwives in those settings. On a personal note, my wife is about to have another baby, so we will be particularly attuned to the fantastic help that we will get from midwives before, particularly during and also after the birth. No woman goes through that experience without really appreciating the fantastic work that midwives do.

In this job as shadow health minister, I get to spend a lot of time talking to nurses and midwives. I think it is fair to say that they love what they do. They are very passionate about caring for South Australians, but they do feel under a lot of pressure. They feel like the pressure is increasing. I think that has been building up over a period of time, but I think it has particularly been building up recently. We only need to look at our emergency departments, at the pressure on them and how that flows through the rest of hospitals, to see what pressure there is.

We know that when we do not have investment in aged care, when we do not have investment in primary care and other settings, then that also increases the pressure on those nurses who work in hospitals and emergency departments. Ultimately, nurses feel this pressure because they want to look after the patients as best they possibly can. That is their ultimate goal, and that is what they train for and set about to do every day.

I am disappointed with a number of things that have happened recently. Particularly in my job, I will be campaigning to address them. One is the hit that has happened for nurses in the last few weeks in relation to parking at hospitals. We have been told that nurses who work in our public hospital system are going to be hit with an additional $725 a year in increased costs just to get to work to care for people and save their lives. Of course, if you are doing a night shift, you cannot get public transport; you would need to drive there.

It also intersects with another particular issue, which is the safety of nurses when they get to work and when they are at work. This is something I know that the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation—I particularly note that we have in the chamber today Adjunct Associate Professor Elizabeth Dabars, who is a staunch advocate on behalf of nurses and midwives—have been outlining an action plan on how to address this and how to take action to improve the safety of staff and patients in the hospital system. I think that absolutely is important to do.

But I am also worried that, if we are getting this increase in costs for nurses to park their cars safely in car parks, we will see an increase in parking in more dangerous locations around hospitals. That will mean that nurses, midwives and other staff will have to go further through dark streets late at night to get to their cars when they leave. It is also very important that we have security measures in place for nurses and midwives inside the hospital system.

Safety and security issues are of course important in other sectors as well; in particular, we have been talking about the issues in terms of outback nursing. We have before the house this week a motion to ensure that Gayle's Law is protected. I am very passionate about doing that because we need to make sure that nurses in remote settings are protected as well.

We need to make sure that we are supporting our nurses and thanking them, but also using them to their best capabilities. As the member for Hurtle Vale has outlined, nurses go through an immense amount of training—university training and professional training. We need to make sure that our system is using them to the best of their abilities, through the scope of their practice and through the ability to have criteria-led discharge. These are very important issues. I look forward to working with the ANMF and continuing our work to support nurses and midwives in South Australia.