Working Together Project Expansion

Overview

Health services continue to experience significant nursing and midwifery workforce issues such as difficulties with recruitment and retention of skilled nurses and midwives in speciality areas such as emergency care, critical care, maternity services, special care nursery, and aged care. As a result, health services can resort to using high levels of casual agency staff to help bridge the gap.

Combined with continuing decrease of inpatient length of stay, and increase in patient complexity and acuity, this contributes to nursing and midwifery teams being at risk of experiencing:

• unsustainable and unachievable workloads;
• erosion of teams;
• poor transfer of knowledge from experienced to less-experienced clinicians; and
• decreased job satisfaction, personal and mental well-being.

These factors all have a potentially detrimental impact on the prevalence of missed elements of patient care (which affect the patient experience); nurse/midwife satisfaction and engagement; the ratio of part-time and full-time staff; nurse/midwife retention and sick leave rates; and the use of additional unplanned and unbudgeted resources.

The Working Together project involves the co-design, trialling and evaluation of improved nursing and midwifery workload allocation and management practices at Western Health, while working within the prescribed nurse/midwife to patient ratios outlined in the Safe Patient Care Act 2015, and in keeping with requirements of the enterprise agreement.

Aim

The Working Together project aims to improve the working lives of nurses and midwives, and decrease any fundamental elements of care that are missed in the current paradigm of their work.

Expected outcomes of the project include improved workforce capability, well-being, and availability, and patient care. The model proposes that better workload management, a more productive work environment, and work satisfaction that comes from providing a high standard of clinical care would help improve retention and keep highly-skilled and dedicated nurses and midwives in the workforce.