Support student nurses to become Midwives

NSW Health recently decided that 3rd Year Nursing Students cannot apply for post-graduate Midwifery places for the following year.

Many students are just completing their nursing degrees in order to go into Midwifery, and will be forced into New Graduate nursing places instead of fulfilling their dreams. This will be very costly for NSW Health, as it is a significant use of resources to look after newly graduated nurses in their first year. These resources would be better spent on graduates who wish to be nurses, not those who were forced to use it as a stepping stone to midwifery.

With the new National Education standards about to come into effect, it is likely that these students will now have to endure another 3 years of study, in a separate Bachelor's degree, in order to become midwives. This is extremely unfair on them, and is happening only because they graduate in the middle of a messy, ill-thought out change in Nurse and Midwife Registration in Australia.

University of Newcastle Students learned this only weeks after learning that the Graduate Diploma had been cancelled at that uni, without their knowledge, a double whammy for these students - they can't go through their own university, and can't go into the correspondence course either! This also means there will be a 2-3 year gap in midwife graduates in the Hunter region - is this really what we want with the shortage of midwives?