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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-05-16 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

Nurses and Midwives

The Hon. N.F. COOK (Hurtle Vale—Minister for Human Services) (15:18): I will not acknowledge all of the people in the gallery, because that will take up the entire five minutes of my speaking time. I just want to say thank you so much for turning up and showing up all of the time, to all of you. You can certainly take the nurse out of the hospital but you cannot take the hospital out of the nurse—or, indeed, the nurse out of the nurse. I often joke about nursing being the most consistently respected profession in our community and I think I have cracked this joke more than once. Well, here I am: I will always be a nurse.

It is volunteer week. I have also been reflecting on the journey that you take to a career that is something that you fit. I started volunteering as a St John cadet. It turned my mind to providing assistance and support to people who were not always experiencing the best of times in their life. I am just so pleased that that encouraged me to make those decisions to take on the role of a nurse in my community.

Like I said, you cannot take the nurse out of the nurse and I always feel that even in all the work I do here in parliament that it is a way for me to try to make life better for people, make life more livable for people and also to help others in our community to see what they can see and be what they can see. I think that is about how we as nurses do project ourselves. We are not just in the clinical setting, but I think of midwives in the most challenging times of somebody's life, and nurses as well, and how they can demonstrate to the people around them and the people they are looking after how to actually make that lemonade out of lemons type thing and see that journey forward.

This year, there are two really excellent themes for midwifery day: 'Together again: from evidence to reality'. In itself I think that speaks to the way that nurses and midwives go about collectively using the evidence to develop the skills and the capacity in their practice to move forward, actually thinking about what they are doing, reflecting on what they are doing, evidence-based practice. The theme for nurses, of course, is always about that leadership: 'Our Nurses. Our Future'.

Last Friday, I had the great pleasure of starting my day at the Nursing and Midwifery branch conference. During that time I listened to some excellent early morning addresses from the State Secretary, Elizabeth Dabars, whom I hold dearly as a friend and respect enormously in the work that she has done now over many years. She talked about how we are doing much better, I think, at trying to transition workers into the workplace and the work we are doing as leaders in our community.

She talked about some of the challenges that we are still facing around aggression and violence in the workplace and how the ANMF is leading that call to encourage SA Health and encourage workplaces to put in place better strategies so that nobody at work has to face the violence that they face. This goes down to a deep-seated heart of reality in our community where, sadly, drug taking, alcohol and also deep-seated generational poverty are making challenges almost insurmountable for some people, which is increasing that drug taking and escalating that violence.

Leadership is not accidental. It sometimes is built deeply within a person, but I think that the workplace itself can encourage and nurture nurses as leaders. There are so many amongst us who have those skills, who can demonstrate how to work not just in a health setting but in a general community leadership setting. I often talk in public to encourage nurses to take that next step as leaders to bring people on that journey.

When I discuss my portfolio around housing and shelter being this material linchpin to wellbeing, what holds the capacity for people to do better in their lives, I think nurses and midwives in the workplace are most definitely the human linchpin to wellbeing, and I say happy nurses and midwives day to all of my friends, particularly those here in the chamber today.

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