Nurses making their mark in rural communities

Nurses making their mark in rural communities

Rural nurses nationwide are fulfilling a vital role in primary health care and International Nurses’ Day (May 12) is the ideal occasion to celebrate their efforts and achievements.

Rural nurses across various levels of the profession are cornerstones of community healthcare and are often the only form of healthcare in some situations, says Kirsty Murrell-McMillan, rural nurse specialist and chairwoman of the New Zealand Rural General Practice Network.

Southland-based Ms Murrell-McMillan says nurses are the one group in rural communities who offer continuity in the rural healthcare and that an effective nursing team results in higher staff and job satisfaction and contributes towards doctor recruitment and retention in some hard-to-staff rural areas.

“In places like Oxford, in Canterbury, where they couldn’t recruit doctors, they set up a very effective nursing team, which covered after hours and now they have no problem recruiting doctors.

“In New Zealand we have developed nursing in rural areas to meet the needs of the Primary Healthcare Strategy. Nurses are pivotal to the provision of health care in rural communities. We think it is time to celebrate what nurses give to the rural community.

Ms Murrell-McMillan’s Masters’ research looked at why nurses stay in rural and established that they are consistent providers of care within rural New Zealand because they are very often connected to their communities and have higher levels of job satisfaction.

“They stay because they like the variety of work and wide scope of practice, which means they develop wide expertise. Nurses can be doing anything from trauma work to more routine treatments. They see higher numbers of accident patients working in rural and develop skills in that area.

“The advent of PRIME (Primary Response In Medical Emergency) scheme means that both doctors and nurses in rural communities are trained to deal with accidents, so you are as likely to have a nurse turn up as a doctor. Before the advent of PRIME we had many people who died unnecessarily from complications as the result of an accident or a medical emergency because they didn’t get early intervention. In many cases in rural New Zealand it is nurses only who are offering this form of treatment.”

New Zealand is the only country in the world that has the PRIME scheme, which was introduced in the early 1990s.

Temuka-based Nurse Practitioner Sharon Hansen says this year’s International Nurses’ Day theme - Delivering Quality, Serving Communities: Nurses Leading Chronic Care - fits well with rural communities. “It’s right up our alley, isn’t it?”

“In rural areas the nursing specialty is generalist whereas in urban practice you might just be dealing with one disease process or be a specialist in one field. You don’t have that option in rural. You are everything and you need to know a lot about everything.

She stresses that nursing standards are pretty consistent in rural and urban settings with some adaptation between the two.

“We all know that rural has always suffered from lack of resources as far as organised services go compared to the urban setting. It’s just where the population is. Today, in the rural setting we have nurses who provide the broadest range of skills and without those nurses in those communities you wouldn’t have a service at all.

“I think that’s an absolute celebration of nursing that the profession has always managed and always been able to look at the needs of the community and put those needs first,” says Sharon.

To nursing students pondering a career direction, she says “you are never bored in the rural setting, there’s such a broad range of things you need to have expertise in and that expertise can and does grow over the years.”

International Nurses’ Day serves as a reminder of how far the profession has come and the high standards it offers in the modern day, says Sharon.

• Nurses in New Zealand will join their counterparts around the world and celebrate International Nurses’ Day on May 12, the anniversary of Florence Nightingale's birth. The day, which has a different theme every year, has been celebrated since 1988 when it was Safe Motherhood. The IND theme for 2010 is: Delivering Quality, Serving Communities: Nurses Leading Chronic Care.

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