Nursing had become “too dangerous” for Catherine Taylor before she left the profession. Ms Taylor resigned in April from her job as a nurse in an acute mental health care unit in south-west Sydney. “It was just getting too dangerous. I felt we were getting a lot of new graduates who were inexperienced and undergraduates who have done a week’s mental health training,” she said. “This led to inexperienced staff dealing with highly psychotic patients who would either escalate the situation or not know how to handle it and not report a patient who was suicidal because they didn’t want to appear incompetent. “That placed a lot of stress on senior staff and put them at risk.” A new study of nurses and midwives’ wellbeing by the Monash Business School has found almost a third of Australia’s nurses are thinking of leaving the profession because they are overworked, undervalued and in danger of burning out. The survey “What Nurses & Midwives Want: Findings from the National Survey on Workplace Climate and Well-being” also found a quarter of those surveyed reported they were either likely or very likely to leave the profession. Researchers said there is a looming shortage, with the majority of the nursing and midwifery workforce in Australia already aged 47 years or older and set to retire in the next decade.
