More Money for Victorian Nurses

Nursing is one of those occupations that only genuinely good people enter.  If you think about what nurses do all day, it's easy to understand why you might occasionally meet a surly one.  In fact, it's difficult to understand why they're not all surly.

We're all terrible company when we're sick, and even worse when we can't take care of ourselves.  Imagine having to work all kinds of hours and endure whining and belligerent patients who soil themselves then blame it on you.  Now imagine having to do it for less money than is offered in the next state.

Victorian Division 1 nurses with seven years experience earn $52,000pa, as compared with $61,000pa in New South Wales.  Given the work is the same, there's little excuse for such a discrepancy in the pay scale.

So, once again Victorian public nurses are preparing for industrial action, in an effort to equalise their wages.  They're asking for a 6% annual hike over 3 years and an improvement to nurse:patient ratios, whereas the state government is only prepared to offer 3.25% with no additional relief.

I'm curious about the hundreds of additional nurses Steve Bracks promised.  Were they all swallowed up by that moronic Nurse on Call initiative?  Clearly that exists only to inexpensively bolster the raw statistics of nurses in Victoria, without actually providing any relief to triage.

Now Bracks' replacement John Brumby in his infinite wisdom, wants to make nursing wages performance based, as they are for police.  The eight hundred additional police promised by Bracks have apparently all gone into revenue-raising where it's easy for them to earn their pay rise by dialling-down the tolerance of their radar guns.

I'm a little perplexed as to how one would implement this performance-based wage incentive for nurses, though.  Certainly every patient being treated must be attended to adequately.  So how then do you ask nurses to increase their outcomes beyond 100%?

Clearly crime doesn't work the same way.  Policing is a 'best effort' system where a certain percentage of crimes go unaddressed, so performance-based incentives actually mean something.  You can't really compare that to nursing, can you?...  Unless of course nurses are expected to shake down patients who don't heal quickly enough.

The battle over wages is a public relations nightmare for nurses.  If they strike, or reduce their efforts then they're vilified for 'selfishly' causing additional delays for the sake of a few measly dollars.  However it's obvious that if they aren't prepared to stick to their guns and pressure the government, they'll never be taken seriously.

If we want our quality of care to improve in this state then we have to pay fair wages, and staff hospitals adequately.  Since our goal should not be to play catch-up, but rather to put the rest of Australia to shame, then we must match the wages offered in New South Wales.  Since the cost of living is a bit lower in Victoria, this should yield a measure of fairness in favour of our nurses and attract more people to an otherwise very unattractive vocation.