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Your Stories
This is where we tell your stories, cover topical issues and promote meaningful initiatives.
Supporting the wellbeing of remote agency nurses
CRANAplus regularly partners with organisations from the remote health sector to support staff mental health and wellbeing. A recent collaboration with nursing agency Affinity Nursing has upskilled the agency’s placement specialists and provided its nurses with valuable self-care strategies.
Conferences provide a place where networking, education and collaboration can occur, and many wonderful outcomes have developed from last October’s 40th CRANAplus Conference. One of these has been a new collaboration between the CRANAplus Mental Health & Wellbeing (MHW) team and corporate member Affinity Nursing. In the CRANAplus Conference Wellbeing Lounge, the MHW team had conversations with Katherine Lynch, Remote Placement Specialist (RPS) at Affinity Nursing, about how our two organisations can work together to better support the wellbeing of their rural and remote-based agency nurses.
Katherine shared experiences of Affinity’s remote placement specialists who have supported remote agency area nurses during challenging times. As a result of several subsequent conversations exploring how the MHW team could better support both Affinity Nursing and the agency nurses themselves, CRANAplus staff Laura Berry (MHW Educator) and Dr Nicole Jeffery-Dawes (Senior Psychologist, Bush Support Line) developed and delivered a series of virtual workshops to Affinity remote placement specialists and a separate session for newly placed Affinity agency nurses.
The learning objectives of the sessions included:
- Further developing the understanding of Affinity remote placement specialists to the rewards and challenges of living and working as a remote area nurse, including providing real-life scenarios of these rewards, challenges and possible management strategies.
- Upskilling Affinity placement specialists on possible strategies to support agency nurses to manage their wellbeing.
- Discussing a “Check in Checklist” that placement specialists can use to check in with their agency nurses during placement to ensure they are asking the ‘right’ questions to let them know they are supported.
- Building capacity of Affinity placement specialists to identify when agency nurses may need extra wellbeing support, including the Bush Support Line.
- Promoting the value of the Bush Support Line in supporting the wellbeing of agency nurses.
The partnership was a rewarding experience for all involved and hopefully a positive step towards ensuring a more sustainable agency nursing workforce.
What was profoundly rewarding for Laura and Nicole, was how much Affinity staff were invested in supporting their remote agency nurses and how much they valued the opportunity to learn strategies for better supporting them while out on remote placements.
From Affinity’s perspective, the feedback from the workshop participants was incredibly positive, with all Affinity staff who attended the sessions rating the program content five out of five (where 5 = ‘extremely useful’).
Affinity staff also reported that the honest, practical, real-life scenarios and lived experience of the CRANAplus presenters
were highly valued.
Feedback from Affinity staff included:
“Coming from someone without a nursing background, this was extremely insightful and useful tools when talking to my nurses out in rural and remote.”
“Enjoyed the session. Presenters were knowledgeable and engaging.”
“It was brilliant and covered some very valuable content that I’ve learnt a lot from. I have a more in-depth understanding of what Bush Support Line offers. You guys are amazing, intelligent, cool people!”
The Mental Health & Wellbeing team looks forward to future opportunities to collaborate with Affinity Nursing, as well as other agencies and workplaces, to enhance the mental health and wellbeing of remote area nurses.
The team invites any organisation employing or facilitating the employment of remote area nurses to reach out to learn more about CRANAplus’ mental health and wellbeing services. To get in touch, email wellbeing@crana.org.au