Building Nursing Knowledge to Meet the Needs of Disruptive Technology Healthcare Re-Design

This paper provides a discourse based upon the key development of nursing in response to the emerging 4Ds of health technology re-design. Building informatics capability among health professionals is a workforce issue necessitated through the increasing prevalence of information technology and digitization of healthcare affecting the entire health workforce, specifically front-line nurses. The key concepts will be explored of Digitization, Distribution, Disruption and Diversity, a framework recognising the tsunami of technology such as Big Data analytics, comprehensive decision support systems for nursing, nanobots, robotics, and pharmacogenomics and the impact these have upon the nursing workforce.

Deeply Discrediting: A Systematic Review Examining the Conceptualizations and Consequences of the Stigma of Working in Aged Care

Background and Objectives The stigma of working in aged care can discredit and devalue those working in gerontology. This overlooked workforce issue may underpin complex staffing challenges like chronic worker shortages and inadequate care delivery. Our review synthesizes the existing literature and introduces a conceptual framework based on linguistics to reconcile disparate conceptualizations and negative consequences of this stigma. Research Design and Methods We conducted a systematic review and assessed peer-reviewed articles published from 1973 to 2019 across 5 databases. Fifty-nine articles were selected based on criteria grounded in stigma theory. Results Only 10 articles explicitly used the term “stigma” when conceptualizing the stigma of working in aged care. An additional 49 articles conceptualized this stigma in terms of stigma processes (e.g., status loss). Findings from a deeper examination using a linguistic analysis revealed societal groups predominantly conceptualized stigma in 3 distinct ways based on (a) unfavorable character judgment of aged care workers, (b) lower value placed on aged care work, and (c) negative emotional reactions towards working in aged care. Last, stigma was associated with adverse psychological and job-related consequences. Discussion and Implications Reconceptualizing this workforce issue and recognizing it as a societal challenge will enable policymakers to design evidence-based interventions at industry and societal levels. We propose workforce challenges in the aged care sector such as attraction, retention, and well-being may lessen with interventions aimed at mitigating the stigma of working in aged care.

Attracting and retaining nurses through a clinical fellowship programme

Shortages in nursing are the single biggest and most urgent workforce issue that the NHS needs to address. This article sets out the early success of the Nurse Clinical Fellowship Programme established by The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust. The unique programme aims to attract and retain nurses by offering a staff nurse post with supported access to academia, fully funded by the NHS Trust. To date, the Trust has attracted 90 nurses (both UK and international registered nurses) to the programme. The programme is also offered internally and the Trust has a cohort of 10 internal nursing staff enrolled onto the programme completing either their BSc (top-up) or Masters, with a second cohort of 60 internal nurses due to start in September 2019. To support international registered nurses with demonstrating their competence to meet Nursing and Midwifery Council requirements the Trust has also established an objective structured clinical examination preparation course designed to embrace and enhance the existing knowledge and skills, while guiding staff in transferring these in line with UK and Trust policies and practices.

Environmental health in Australia: overlooked and underrated

Improvements in environmental health have had the most significant impact on health status. In Australia, life expectancy has significantly increased through provision of vaccination, safe food and drinking water, appropriate sewage disposal and other environmental health measures. Yet the profession that is instrumental in delivering environmental health services at the local community level is overlooked. Rarely featuring in mainstream media, the successes of Environmental Health Officers (EHOs) are invisible to the general public. As a consequence, students entering university are unaware of the profession and its significant role in society. This has resulted in there being too few EHOs to meet the current regulatory requirements, much less deal with the emerging environmental health issues arising as a consequence of changing global conditions including climate change. To futureproof Australian society and public health this workforce issue, and the associated oversight of environmental health must be addressed now.