Nurses push for holistic healthcare

Sabra Lane: Health care has been a constant issue throughout the election campaign, yet the peak professional body for nurses says the system needs more than a boost to Medicare staffing and training. It argues the entire system needs a revamp. Isabel Moussalli reports.

Isabel Moussalli: Registered nurse and health equity expert Sonia Martin takes a different approach to providing health care to some of our most vulnerable.

Sonia Martin: We’re all incredibly altruistic, but sometimes that’s really confronting for people who have been in a space of trauma for a long period of time.

Isabel Moussalli: Her organisation OneBridge is nurse-led, combining health and social care services in NSW and Queensland, with a particular focus on people experiencing homelessness or on the brink of it. She says it’s not just about treating symptoms.

Sonia Martin: So we need to build relationships, we need to take time, we need to sit with people and those socialised models of health care allow us to build relationships where we see people willing to talk with us, willing to get referrals and where we can actually help facilitate that.

Isabel Moussalli: She’s also the chair of the Australian College of Nursing’s Street Health Faculty. The college is today calling for the next federal government to reform the current approach to health care. CEO Kathryn Zeitz explains.

Kathryn Zeitz: We know that medicine isn’t the only driver of health outcomes. So it’s really important that we have a more holistic approach to health care that puts people not medicine at the centre. Some of those things are things like income, education, how you access your health care.

Isabel Moussalli: She sees nurses as central to this wider approach, but she argues the funding model needs an overhaul, including more access to Medicare.

Kathryn Zeitz: The funding model at the moment is a very medicine-centric funding model. And so we think that there needs to be more work done to be able to support nurse-led models of care. Nurses currently access less than 1% of Medicare funding. So there isn’t the financial incentive for nurses to want to develop unique models of care that address chronic disease issues.

Isabel Moussalli: Suzanne Robinson is a Professor of Health Economics at Deakin University and Curtin University.

Suzanne Robinson: I think it’s an ideal concept. I think nurses having access to being able to bill for more things is actually a good thing. But working alongside general practice, what we don’t want to do is take money away from GPs. There’s not enough for the practices to function. So it has to be thought about in terms of what that bundle of care might look like.

Isabel Moussalli: A spokesperson for Health Minister Mark Butler said Labor has raised Medicare rebates for nurse practitioners by 30% and launched a review into the barriers and red tape that prevent Australia from unleashing the full potential of our health workforce. While Shadow Health Minister Anne Ruston said the Coalition understands the importance of strengthening preventative health and pointed to a promised boost to Medicare funding, which is also promised by Labor.

Sabra Lane: Isabel Moussalli reporting with Katherine Gregory.