Key Facts:
- Nine national nursing and midwifery organisations have jointly endorsed a Statement on multidisciplinary teams in healthcare, calling for closer collaboration between health professionals at a time when nearly 800,000 hospital admissions annually are for potentially preventable conditions.
- The Statement calls on governments to fund teamwork and coordination time, establish clear clinical governance standards, and remove regulatory barriers that prevent nurses, midwives, and advanced practice clinicians from working to their full scope of practice.
- Local communities, particularly those in rural and remote areas, should be empowered to design care teams that suit their needs, and health records should be made accessible to all authorised health professionals involved in a person's care.
- The Statement argues that leadership of multidisciplinary teams should reflect the needs of the individual receiving care, with nurse practitioners, midwives, or registered nurses taking a coordinating role where appropriate, rather than defaulting to professional hierarchies.
- Despite being Australia's largest and most widely distributed health workforce, nurses and midwives face significant funding inequities - including nurse practitioners being excluded from all MyMedicare incentive payments unless linked to a GP-led service - which the organisations say must urgently be addressed.
Leading nursing and midwifery organisations have outlined a new blueprint for closer collaboration between health professionals.
The joint Statement on multidisciplinary teams in health care, endorsed by nine national nursing and midwifery bodies comes at a critical time. Last year, nearly 800,000 hospital admissions were for conditions that could potentially have been prevented with earlier care in the community.
The Statement is a responsible and practical response to a changing health landscape, with Australians living longer with more complex and chronic conditions. It calls for reform of a system that fails to embrace the full skills and expertise of every health professional despite critical health workforce shortages across Australia.
The Statement calls on governments to:
- Pay for teamwork: Fund the time health professionals spend meeting, coordinating care, and planning together, so that nurse- and midwife-led services can be financially viable.
- Set clear rules on clinical governance and responsibility: Develop shared clinical governance and safety standards that make clear who is responsible for what, embed Cultural Safety, and put individuals' needs and preferences first.
- Remove unnecessary barriers: Address regulatory constraints that stop nurses, midwives and other advanced practice clinicians from working to their full scope of practice.
- Let communities shape their services: Support local communities, especially in rural and remote areas, to design care teams that fit their needs.
- Connect health records: Make sure every authorised health professional caring for a person can access the information they need from that person's health record.
The Statement comes two years after a major federal government review found that many health professionals are prevented from using the full range of skills they are trained and qualified for.
The Statement says leadership of multidisciplinary teams should reflect the needs and context of the person receiving care and the team.
"There isn't one model that works for every person or every community," said Australian College of Nursing Chief Executive Officer, Adjunct Professor Kathryn Zeitz FACN. "For an older person managing several long-term conditions at home, the best person to coordinate their care might be a nurse practitioner. For a woman going through pregnancy and birth, it might be her midwife. In a remote town, a registered nurse may be the only health professional for hundreds of kilometres."
"We urgently need structural and, importantly, funding change to reflect this reality," said Australian College of Nurse Practitioners CEO, Geri Sumpter. "Funding should follow patient and community needs, not professional hierarchies."
Nurses and midwives are Australia's largest health workforce, and the most widely distributed across the country. Yet despite doing much of the day-to-day work of health checks, managing chronic conditions, coordinating care when people leave hospital, and making sure medicines are used safely, funding structures often do not support nurses to work to their full scope of practice. Nurse practitioners are excluded from all incentive payments and funding arrangements available under the MyMedicare model unless they are linked to, or practising within, a general practitioner-led service. This exclusion creates a significant inequity for both patients and providers.
Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association CEO, Tanya Vogt, said the International Council of Nurses definition of nursing notes that nurses lead, educate, research, advocate, innovate and shape policy to improve health outcomes.
"Nursing work is critical to ensuring Australians' health care is comprehensive and coordinated," she said. "Better funding this work means safe, high-quality care, delivered more efficiently, and better health outcomes."
The Statement is endorsed by the Australian College of Mental Health Nurses, the Australian College of Midwives, the Australian College of Nurse Practitioners, the Australian College of Nursing, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, the Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association, the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives, the Council of Deans of Nursing and Midwifery, and CRANAplus.
