Thousands of nursing and disability care students across Australia are being prevented from completing clinical placements required to graduate due to pandemic restrictions and the furloughing of senior staff who supervise them.
With a severe shortage of healthcare workers, the Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association (APNA) said if the issue was not urgently addressed, an increasing backlog of nursing students will mean there are not enough trained nurses to staff aged care homes, general practices, and other settings.
This comes at a time when the healthcare system as a whole, and nursing staff in particular, are already under unprecedented strain after working through two years of the Covid pandemic. On Tuesday, thousands of nurses across NSW went on strike, protesting low pay and “unsustainable” working conditions.
A student completing her diploma of nursing through Tafe in Victoria told Guardian Australia she began studying her certificates in ageing support and disability in April 2019, and should have finished courses in May 2020.
“As Covid hit, almost all of the facilities in aged care, disability and home and community care shut their doors to students as part of infection control, but under the requirements of the certificate to successfully gain the qualification, students are required to undertake 120 hours of placement,” she said.
“The training organisation I was with struggled to get any students in my classes the placement hours, and as a result I still have not got my certificate in ageing support.”
She then applied for a diploma of nursing but has encountered the same issue. She should be close to completing her course, but has still not completed the placement hours required.
“Tafe Victoria has a special team dedicated to sourcing placement, but we are continuously told there is a serious backlog of students and there are limited placements available,” the student said.
“On some occasions, I had a placement booked in, however they were cancelled due to a positive Covid-19 case at the facility. One of the other frustrating things with placement is that training organisations only have placement partnerships with selected hospitals.
“Many of us are not able to receive our qualification. I felt such huge anger and frustration that the defence force has been asked to help out in aged care and is allowed in, yet someone like myself with training can’t. It absolutely makes no sense.
“My qualifications that I have been working hard to gain are not worth anything and I feel I have just wasted all this time.”
The president of APNA, Karen Booth, said “thousands” of nursing students were facing similar issues. APNA has been working with universities and tertiary institutions to provide nursing placements for undergraduate and postgraduate students in aged care homes and other facilities to reduce reliance on hospitals.
But Booth said more support is needed to expand the program and coordinate it nationally.
“Our primary healthcare nurses desperately need help, and nursing students – many thousands of whom find themselves unable to get the clinical placement experience they need – are a ready-made solution,” she said.
“Nursing students can be utilised in primary healthcare to triage patients, help with health checks, and help registered nurses with vaccine clinics and other clinical activities.
“More importantly, supervised student nurses, using approved scripted checklists, could do welfare calls to people at home who are sick with Covid, and escalate treatment to registered nurses or general practitioners as needed.”
A spokesperson from the federal department of health said the government had sought to address health workforce issues by establishing the “Aged Care Workforce Rapid Response Initiative” in December, a pilot program aimed at connecting students undertaking a Certificate III in Individual Support (Ageing) that require work placements with residential aged care providers who urgently need staff.
Providers are expected to pay students while they undertake their placement. The spokesperson did not say how many students had found industry placement through the program.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education, Skills and Employmentsaid that it is ultimately up to individual healthcare providers, and any state or territory public health orders, to determine student access to facilities and the appropriateness of work placements.
“The commonwealth’s training regulator, ASQA, has noted there is flexibility for training providers to bring forward theoretical training and use simulated workplace environments where clinical placements have been disrupted,” he said.
“The Australian government strongly encourages healthcare providers and registered training organisations to assist students wherever possible to make work placements available.”
