Chris Ellison (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Adams for what is a very important question to the public of Australia and acknowledge Senator Adams’s great interest in this area, particularly in her home state of Western Australia.

The Prime Minister has announced that we will provide funding of $170 million to create 25 Australian hospital nursing schools to deliver hospital based training for enrolled nurses in both public and private hospitals. It is important to remember that we are covering both public and private hospitals with this announcement. We see this as a partnership between both those sectors and a step forward in providing additional nurses and the incentives for people to take up a nursing career.

In relation to this initiative, students will receive practical on-site training at our hospitals and will achieve nationally accredited qualifications at the diploma or advanced diploma level. Selected hospitals will receive infrastructure funding from the Australian government for educational facilities to be developed, and we will provide for training staff for those participating hospitals. The first intake is expected to be in 2008, and we envisage about 500 additional enrolled nurses taking this up.

There are a number of incentives, as I mentioned. Firstly, participating hospitals will pay trainees’ salaries until they attain their qualifications. The Australian government will provide wage subsidies to hospital nursing schools for each student for the first three months of $500 a week to assist the schools to provide their students with a wage. As well, the Australian government will pay the hospital nursing schools a $1,500 commencement fee or bonus and an additional $2,500 on completion for each student. In addition to these payments to the hospital nursing schools, the Australian government will directly pay each student a tax-free bonus of $2,000 once they have successfully completed their first six months of a course and a further tax-free bonus of $3,000 when they have successfully completed the whole course.

These are tangible incentives to get more people into nursing. I might add that this is in addition to the university based system that we have. In fact, since 2005, under the Howard government we have seen an additional 3,700 nursing training places at universities. That will grow to 10,000 by 2012. This initiative builds on the existing university based training and will provide practical hospital based training.

We are desperately short of nurses in this country, and this initiative will act to remedy that. It has been recognised widely. In fact, I saw a statement put out on 15 September by the Western Australian branch of the Australian Nursing Federation welcoming this plan, as do other people involved in the nursing profession in this country. This is a very good initiative which is good news for the administration of health care in this country.