WITHOUT conceding for a moment that anything has been less than stellar the Chief Minister has announced a vast swathe of changes to nursing practice.

“We know the overwhelming majority of patients report high satisfaction levels with the care they receive, but it is important that we keep evolving to improve care, make patients’ stays more comfortable and ensure our highly-trained nurses use their skills where they are most valuable,” Katy said.

Some of the changes underway or already implemented include:

• Team nursing which involves nurses working as a team to provide care for all patients on the ward, which replaces the model where individual nurses are allocated a set group of patients to care for.
• Assistants in Nursing added to the teams to supplement delivery of patient care.
• Visiting hours changes – Shortly, where it is deemed clinically appropriate revised visiting hours of 0600 to 2100 will be rolled out to align with the opening hours of the hospital. This aims to establish consistent visiting hours across general inpatient wards of the hospital as family and visitors can be an important component of the healing experience for patients whilst at the same time reduce the anxiety and social isolation associated with illness.
• Implementation of Patient Trackers to enable patients to record and ‘score’ their experience at the actual point of care.
• The introduction of a tissue viability team, which assesses patients’ skin to identify those at risk of pressure injuries and design plans to minimise the risk of uncomfortable sores or other pressure injuries (there has been an 80% reduction in hospital acquired pressure injuries since 2010).
• Better/easier to access food packaging.
• More beds across the Territory.
• Changes to bed configuration at Canberra Hospital to better match bed numbers with demand.
• Ongoing development of online consumer portal.