Grievance Debate

Nurses and Midwives

The Hon. N.F. COOK (Hurtle Vale—Minister for Human Services, Minister for Seniors and Ageing Well) (15:07): I do want to thank and welcome many of our closest friends that we have in the gallery today. The Minister for Health and I are happy to host you for an afternoon tea today to recognise the hard work and the excellent contribution of both midwives and nurses on the special days, held a week apart.

I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge some people by name. I hope I have all of you: Dr Megan Cooper, Jennifer Hurley, Adjunct Associate Professor Elizabeth Dabars, Samantha Mead, Annette Cieslak, Nicole Kelly, Marrisha Singh, Elisa Gardiner, Pauline Connell, Professor Tiffany Conroy, Professor Rachael Vernon, Professor Jenny Fereday, Professor Tracy Humphrey—and we do we have some titles missing, sorry—Marion Eckert, Kim Gibson, Alice Steeb, Ketra Mtombeni, Meagan Connolly and Tracey Yeend. Welcome to parliament.

On International Nurses Day, the anniversary of Florence Nightingale's birth, we celebrate Nurses Day every year. This year's theme, the economic power of care, has significant meaning in terms of the drive to invest in nursing quality and quality care outcomes across the globe. When I was looking up some of the themes—as you know, I do not read speeches very well—it did talk about the ideal standard of ratio of nurses per head of population, which I understand is about 70 nurses to 10,000 people. Sadly, around three-quarters of the world does not actually meet that standard, so that means a poor outcome for people in the community, a lack of access to health care, and no doubt actually means acute care needing to be accessed by more people than is necessary, because, as we know, some of the best work done by nurses is done out in the community.

Now in parliament I have the absolute privilege of working with the Department of Human Services—and, more recently now, the Department of Ageing Well in the portfolio of seniors and ageing well—in order to bring together policies and health strategies with the Minister for Health in order to be able to strengthen our community and work alongside other global missions which are really well articulated through the sustainable goals. I have spoken about these before. If I look at the first three sustainable goals around zero poverty, zero hunger and good health and wellbeing, they sit really beautifully in the Department of Human Services and the Office for Ageing Well mission of connecting communities and bringing people closer together, alleviating poverty, making sure people are well fed, making sure that quality communities can get together, and trying to combat really challenging issues like loneliness.

Today I visited The Hut up in the Hills, in Aldgate. They are the recipients of a grant in order to investigate and work out some strategies to combat loneliness amongst men. That is a $40,000 Office for Ageing Well grant, and sits really well on the background of a study and a project that is already being undertaken up there in partnership with the UniSA and workers from the Rosemary Bryant Foundation, who are doing some really great work to dive deeply into the community and talk to people about what loneliness is, what it means, and how we can combat it.

If we learned anything during COVID, it was that loneliness is absolutely one of the most isolating and devastating experiences that we can have in our lives. I think, sadly, what happened was many people who were quite privileged and usually well off suddenly experienced loneliness for the first time. Really, their heads exploded and they thought, 'We'd better try to do something about this, because it's just awful,' whereas hundreds and thousands of people across our country, in our community, experience loneliness every single day. You do not have to be alone to be lonely.

There is obviously this great piece of work that is happening in dual partnerships up there in the community centres. I cannot wait to work with the community centres, with Minister Picton, and with our nurses across our community to really do something about some of these more community-based approaches that can actually make life easier and better in our community but also for our nurses and our midwives. Thank you very much.