Contemporary Nursing & Midwifery Practice

Nursing and midwifery roles and practice are continually evolving as new knowledge and skills are acquired.

Today, nurses and midwives are providing services that are a far cry from traditional stereotypes, including clinical procedures that were once only carried out by doctors.

The Contemporary Nursing and Midwifery Practice initiative helps to ensure that Victoria’s nurses and midwives keep pace with new developments in health and respond to changing patterns of service demand.

We understand that the process of practice development and role change can be challenging and daunting. For this reason, we will work closely with nurses and midwives, employers, education providers and other stakeholders to support the development of service models and innovative roles that allow nurses and midwives to work to their full scope of practice and where indicated, to develop new capability and areas of practice.

The Contemporary Nursing and Midwifery Practice initiative aims to:

• Enhance understandings of contemporary nursing and midwifery roles, services and practice
• Build employers’ capacity to develop and implement contemporary nursing and midwifery roles to match their evolving needs, and
• Support employers to negotiate the professional, educational, industrial, indemnity and other challenges to workforce reform. What’s coming up? Foresight and Frontiers Forums & Workshops We will be running forums and workshops to:
• Promote dialogue and debate about emerging and contemporary workforce issues and solutions
• Challenge customs and conventions that are limitations to workforce and service innovation, and;
• Share information about developments and directions occurring locally, nationally and internationally

Contemporary practice in the spotlight

Throughout 2011-2012 grants are available to public health services to host an event that showcases examples of contemporary nursing and midwifery that are already occurring.

Watch this space for the next showcase events across rural Victoria and Melbourne.

Showcase Host	Date	Invitation / Details	Presentations
Peter Mac Callum Cancer Centre	16 September	Event Flyer	http://www.petermac.org/AdvancingNursingPractice

Guidelines:  Contemporary Practice Showcase Guidelines (pdf, 550kb)

Publication Grants

In early 2012, grants will be offered to encourage and support the production of papers for publication in peer reviewed industry and professional journals, or for presentation at professional or industry conferences.

Successful applications will focus on papers that share developments and strengthen understandings of the spectrum of contemporary nursing and/or midwifery roles, practice and workforce development options.

Watch this space for the opening of the grant round.

Contemporary Nursing and Midwifery Projects

We support projects that develop, test and evaluate new nursing and midwifery roles, service and models that have the potential to positively impact on:

• workforce productivity and efficiency
• service delivery and quality and
• patient and health service outcomes.

An initial expression of interest process (closed October 2011) has been undertaken with Directors of Nursing of public health service to identify the range of nursing and midwifery roles that may be supported.

Making practice contemporary

We are developing a number of resources that will assist employers to design, implement and evaluate their local nursing and midwifery workforce and service needs.

For more information:
nursepolicy@health.vic.gov.au