Thursday, 4 August 2022

Ministers statements: healthcare workers

Ms THOMAS (Macedon—Minister for Health, Minister for Ambulance Services) (14:12): I rise today to update the house on how the Andrews Labor government is supporting the health system and its workforce by delivering 1200 registered undergraduate students of nursing and midwifery, or RUSONs and RUSOMs, as they are known, to hospitals across the state. This employment model was first developed in 2010 under the Brumby Labor government in close collaboration with the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation and indeed a former health minister, but this fantastic initiative was scrapped in December 2010 as part of the major cuts to the health system by those on the other side, the same government who in 2011 cooked up a secret plan not to grow our nursing workforce but to cut it.

When Labor was re-elected in 2014 we ended the war against our healthcare workers that had been waged by those on the other side of the house, and in 2016 the first RUSONs began working on wards at Monash Health, Alfred Health and indeed at Eastern Health. Since then the program has seen over 3000 skilled undergraduate students work in hospitals across Victoria, and it was a real pleasure to be at Sunshine Hospital to meet some of these RUSONs and RUSOMs with the Premier. I am delighted that they will be taking up positions from Sunshine to Tallangatta—a place I know well—providing extra support to more experienced nurses and midwives. This is a unique Victorian innovation, one that is proving overwhelmingly popular with the students themselves, with nurses, with their universities and indeed, most importantly, with patients. This is just another example of how our government will always back our healthcare workforce. We will always innovate. We will listen to the workers and we will implement their good ideas.