Hope all is well.
And yes, Nurses are the glue that keeps Hospitals working. I've often thought their Uni degrees should be provided Free of Charge because they never get the salary opportunities they deserve and without them, our health system just wouldn't be.
SWMBO is a critical care nurse and I'm also in total agreement with the above statement. If certain groups had their way, nurses wouldn't get paid penalty rates either, further devaluing their salary.
Yes - I think the penalty rates earned in the service industry are being lumped into the penalty rates earned by Police, Ambos and Nurses for instance. Just wrong.
I think the problem is more in how the nursing population has been "managed" or afforded any opportunities, and the mismanagement of hospitals overall to go with it.
I'm not sure about providing their degrees free of charge. We can all agree that nurses are an invaluable part of the health system, but to the degree (pun intended) that they should be entitled to free degrees? Other professions - admittedly who may not be able to boast that their occupations are equally indispensable - may have something to say about that. Our capitalist society ensures that the argument that a nurse may never be able to earn the salaries deserving of their value is an essentially invalid one.
The interesting thing about penalty rates for nurses is that you end up having a rather skewed roster demand in some cases where everyone only wants to work when there is no ordinary time, only penalty (OK, not everyone, but it is heavily skewed). It may then be more popular for nurses to simply sign up through nursing agencies rather than institutions proper as there is a greater flexibility that they can gain the hours that they want, including penalty hours. This may be additionally stressful to the core staff at hospitals etc.
We can have a whole new argument about penalty rates and their merits. As for the argument about penalty rates, I don't think police, ambulance and nurses are and should necessarily be immune to that argument. That doesn't mean that the model scenario of removing penalty rates for all will simply mean take the status quo and simply chop off the penalty loading; it just means the staffing management and award levels of the current need to be completely reworked - at least that's how I see it.
My mother has been an ICU nurse for nearly 30 years. Since I was born, I've only known her to work weekends and sometimes on weekday nights in the last 8 years or so. She has never been interested in advancement to management or so on. But her take home salary seems to be quite healthy from what I could gather. That said, I'll plead naivety here because I don't know exactly how much a full time graduate hospital nurse earns.
Now that the system has seemed to catch up with the numbers (mainly through actively importing nurses from overseas - nothing wrong with skilled migration, but the amounts they were paying to import nurses in was astronomical), they are also shrinking down the number of hospitals and generally trying to make the public sector as unattractive as possible.
