New course aims to 'demystify' acute care nursing

January 31, 2007

A new postgraduate program at the University of New England is attracting Registered Nurses from around Australia who want to gain specialist skills in acute care nursing.

About 50 nurses arrived at UNE yesterday for the program's first residential school.

The program, leading to a Graduate Certificate in Acute Care Nursing, is the first of its kind in Australia. Part of its uniqueness lies in the breadth of its scope: it covers emergency, intensive care and coronary care nursing as well as nursing in and around the operating room.

Dr Mary Cruickshank, the UNE Senior Lecturer who designed the program, said it addressed a widespread shortage of nurses trained in acute care. "Planning for the program started in 2004," Dr Cruickshank said, "with discussions between Jackie Lea (UNE's Clinical Coordinator) and Pat Howarth of Port Macquarie Hospital. Pat's major concern was that the average age of nurses working in operating rooms was 49; younger nurses were unwilling to work there without special training."

"During the subsequent planning process," she said, "the hospitals asked for emergency, intensive care and coronary care nursing to be included in the program, along with perioperative nursing."

Dr Cruickshank and her UNE colleague Dr Penny Paliadelis conducted this week's residential school.

All the students are working nurses, and the majority of them are already working in acute care. Most of them are aged between 25 and 30, and many are graduates of UNE's Bachelor of Nursing program. "It's nurses such as these that Area Health Services are wanting to go into acute care nursing," Dr Cruickshank said, "and they need us to demystify it for them."

Expert clinicians from several Area Health Services have joined UNE academics in writing the certificate program, and are involved in its teaching. "It wouldn't have been possible without them," Dr Cruickshank said. "Thanks to them the course is clinically current. The students are thrilled to have expert clinicians talking to them about the latest developments."

One of the students, Tegan Thomas (pictured here), completed her Bachelor of Nursing degree program at UNE last year and already has a full-time position in the operating theatre at Dudley Private Hospital in Orange. "This course will help me along," she said. Another student, Chris Evans, has been working in operating rooms for 36 years, and is now at Warragul Hospital in Victoria. Her involvement began when she agreed to accompany a younger colleague through the course, but she is looking forward to complementing her wide range of practical experience with some new knowledge.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Tegan Thomas displayed here, taken yesterday in UNE's Clinical Laboratory, expands to include David White (Nurse Manager, Critical Care and Retrievals, Tamworth Hospital), who has helped in the writing and the teaching of the Graduate Certificate program, and Dr Penny Paliadelis.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at January 31, 2007 04:36 PM