Teachers and nurses are both in professions where the bulk of the members are government employed and are both underpaid for the work they do. I can only imagine that, by attacking teachers, Ann Lowe thinks it’s going to strengthen the argument for nurses to be better paid. She’s clearly mistaken.

Ignoring this ridiculous statement, I would like to address what you might be trying to say.

Teachers and nurses are both important to society. Why do teachers get more holidays to supplement the short teaching year? Probably because teaching has become the profession that no-one wants to join. As a teacher, it is very frustrating teaching students who have no ambition. It is not always the teacher’s fault that students perform poorly; parents need to take a complementary role to assist the teacher by ensuring children do homework and respect the authority of the teacher. The result of not doing this must be very obvious – the teacher’s task is impossible. The pay is poor by the way.

Regarding nurses, whose job is equally important in many ways – talk to your government whose love of money is the root of the problem. Start a union with some power.

It is all about politics.

Thats ok, but I really don’t think we should take it out on each other. Im a registered nurse, highly specialised with post grad diploma and masters, however, have to state emphatically, my experience in Victoria’s, Queenslands, Tasmania’s and NSW’s Mental Health System is not the system, but, the nurses themselves.

Its true, horizontal violence is insatiable, its a plague, a virus spreading itself, ‘only nurses eat their young’ is what someone told me in my first month out of uni some four almost five years ago.

I spent seven years in the Australian Army before becomming a nurse. Never in my life have I been ridiculed, ‘brow beaten’, attacked, manipulated, backstabbed, lied to, it goes on and on, as much as I have since being a nurse, for a man who humped it out in an infantry battalion for most of his military career, that speaks for something.

As for pay. It is simply APPALLING. I earnt only $200 less per week as a soldier with rank of private in 1997 than I do in all my glory as a nurse. The advanced post grad dip and masters in addition to the 3 year bachelors degree I’ve completed, despite working in mental health for the past comming on my fifth year, my ‘clinical nurse specialist’ (CNS)application here in NSW was rejected, the nurses on the panel telling me the work I was doing was more like a ‘psychologists role’. The CNS pay would have put me at par with my community mental health counterparts in VIC in terms of pay, which would have been RN Grade 3A year 1. Unfortunately, after tax and no other deductions each week, instead I clear $720 for the week only. Some may say hey thats not bad. I say, try feeding a family, paying day care, a mortgage, car repayment, phone, electricity, etc etc, its just not possible. Not to mention, one of my brother in laws earns $20 p/w more a scaffolder and the other $5 p/w more as a 3rd year electricians apprentice.

Add to the indignation of having no additional holidays, being run off your feet all day, having mental health patients abuse you and the only outcome can be high attrition rates in the nursing work fore. But when you consider that there are approximately 25′000 registered nurses in VIC alone, it is simply cheaper to replace the nursing workforce every five years than to give those 25000 nurses a pay rise or proper working conditions.

When I left uni at the end of 2003, an ABS figure quoted to our graduating year was that 85% of the nursing workforce will leave the field within the first five years of graduating, so far, from what I have seen with my graduating colleagues, this has not been the case. I think its because there is simply no other field except maybe ‘pharmacuetical sales rep’ that a nursing degree will help you get into. The bottom line is, I F*#Cking hate nursing, if I didn’t have a family to support, I’d leave it this instant. But when all else fails, do permanent nights.

Really, I should have done buisness!!!!

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