NPAA - Nurses' Professional Association of Australia

23/08/2026

The Prince Charles Hospital inquest continued this week — and the evidence on capacity has not improved.

The coronial inquest into three patient deaths at The Prince Charles Hospital between May and December 2023 resumed, examining the adequacy of care provided by Metro North Hospital and Health Service.

A nurse gave evidence that a new mental health unit is needed. A treating psychiatrist told the inquest the unit still has "a major problem with bed capacity" — despite improvements since the deaths.

Still. Three years on, in a unit already the subject of a coronial inquest.

This is directly relevant to advocacy we have been pursuing with Queensland Health for over a year. Nursing evidence about physical infrastructure and bed capacity has been put on the record repeatedly — in our correspondence about Gladstone, Darling Downs, Bundaberg and Hervey Bay, and now under oath in a coroner's court.

Specialist staff and goodwill cannot substitute for a bed that does not exist. When nurses say a unit is not fit for purpose, that is clinical evidence, and it should carry the same weight as any other.

💬 Queensland members: has bed capacity in your unit changed in the last three years? Tell us below or message us privately.

🔗 Report via ABC News: https://hubs.la/Q04tPQ9D0

If this raises issues for you, support is available: Lifeline 13 11 14 | Nurse & Midwife Support 1800 667 877

22/08/2026

A coroner has found a man died amid the "systemic failings" of an overworked health system.

Petar Josipovic, 62, died at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in September 2023. He needed category one cardiac surgery — the category that requires an operation within 30 days. It was scheduled at 54 days, and then repeatedly rescheduled.

The coroner found he could have survived had the operation happened sooner. And then found the part that every clinician in an under-resourced system will recognise: given the capacity available, operating on him sooner may have come at the cost of another patient.

That is what rationing looks like when it reaches a coroner's court. Not a bad decision by a bad clinician — an impossible decision, made repeatedly, by people with fewer theatres and fewer hours than the waiting list requires.

The coroner made two recommendations to the Health Minister, including an external review of theatre list capacity and surgical cancellations.

Our condolences to Mr Josipovic's family.

💬 Have you seen category one patients slip past their clinically recommended window? What would have to change for that to stop?

🔗 Report via ABC News: https://hubs.la/Q04tMLT00

21/08/2026

Registration renewal is coming. The fee reform practitioners were promised is not.

In November 2025, the National Health Practitioner Ombudsman found that AHPRA's registration fee structure produces unfair outcomes for some practitioners. AHPRA accepted the findings, and changes were flagged for 1 July 2026.

As at mid-August 2026, no outcome from the Pro Rata Fee Review has been published, and no fee schedule contains a pro rata provision.

Meanwhile, medical practitioner renewal falls due 30 September.

So practitioners who register part-way through a period — returning from parental leave, coming back from overseas, moving between roles — are still being asked to pay as though they had the full year, on a structure the Ombudsman has already found produces unfair outcomes.

Deadlines apply to practitioners with absolute precision. They should apply to the regulator too.

💬 Have you been caught by the current fee structure — paying a full year's registration for part of a year? Tell us below.

🔗 Renewal dates, fees and the reform status: https://hubs.la/Q04tPN7M0

21/08/2026

"When I had concerns about my own patients... I was told to keep quiet."

That's the title of a new peer-reviewed study, published in Open Medicine, examining the experiences of healthcare workers under COVID-19 vaccine mandates in Alberta, Canada.

It is a qualitative study — 80 written responses from a survey of 190 healthcare workers, across all vaccination statuses. Not a representative sample, and the authors don't claim it is. What it does is document, in workers' own words, what the mandate period felt like from inside the professions.

The dominant theme the researchers identified was moral injury: the distress of acting against your conscience, witnessing harm you believe you cannot stop, or staying silent under institutional pressure. Alongside it ran coercion, ethical conflict, professional exclusion, institutional betrayal, and the suppression of dissent.

The conclusion is worth quoting at length, because it is careful: mandates were experienced as professionally divisive and, by many respondents, as ethically disruptive; compliance should not be equated with ethical alignment; and high vaccination uptake can obscure coercive conditions. Moral injury emerged "not merely as an individual psychological response, but as a structurally induced ethical harm" — with implications for professional judgment, informed consent, patient care, workforce stability and institutional integrity.

That last phrase matters. If clinicians learn that raising a concern costs them, the loss isn't only theirs. It lands on patients.

🔗 Read the study: https://hubs.la/Q04tL10s0

💬 Colleagues: did you raise a clinical concern during that period and feel you were told to keep quiet? What would have made it safe to speak?

21/08/2026

96%.

That's how many aged care nurses and care workers have experienced or witnessed violence at work in the past year, according to new data from more than 3,550 frontline staff.

And the link to staffing is impossible to ignore. Where staffing was rated "very poor", 88% reported verbal abuse. Where it was rated "very good", that dropped to 66%.

Understaffing isn't just a workload problem. It's a safety problem — for our members and for the people they care for.

💬 Nurses: has your workplace ever treated aggression as "just part of the job"? Tell us in the comments. We're listening, and we're using what you tell us.

🔗 Report via Aged Care Insite: https://hubs.la/Q04tGz9L0

If this raises issues for you, support is available: Lifeline 13 11 14 | Nurse & Midwife Support 1800 667 877

21/08/2026

The Victorian Labor Government is attempting to shut down independent unions which refuse to fund their political campaigns.

Just three months out from an election, they are stripping workers of their right to freely associate. This is a politically motivated attack which must be fought.

Join our fight and take action. More information below!

Victoria's Associations Incorporation Reform Amendment Bill 2026 would let the Government decide which workers' associations may exist. Act before 26 August.

20/08/2026

AHPRA cannot be both the standard-setter and a stakeholder.

Documents released under FOI, reported this week in The Australian, raise serious questions about how AHPRA developed its equity and inclusion strategy and who helped shape it.

According to that reporting, external advocacy organisations supplied consultation lists and sat in on advisory meetings, one was paid an hourly rate to validate drafts, and internal minutes canvassed how to characterise critics before any criticism had arrived. Steering committee minutes reportedly discussed obtaining an advocacy group's workplace accreditation through "covert mechanisms".

You can hold any view at all on the underlying clinical debate and still see the problem here.

A regulator that takes paid input from organisations with a position on the standards it enforces cannot credibly claim independence.

This is not abstract. Dr Andrew Amos was barred from clinical patient contact and from discussing gender medicine publicly based on a reasonable belief of risk, with no finding of professional misconduct. Dr Jillian Spencer was stood down in 2023 and remained under investigation until mid-2026, when the proceedings were discontinued and her concerns were acknowledged as legitimate professional debate.

AMPS supports the call for an independent inquiry into AHPRA's relationships with external advocacy bodies, how the strategy was developed, and how notifications against practitioners who question clinical orthodoxy are handled.

Doctors must be free to read the evidence, raise concerns and disagree in public — without the regulator's answer being written in advance.

🔗 Commentary via The Australian: https://hubs.la/Q04tGz5h0

20/08/2026

Three people died in seven months in The Prince Charles Hospital mental health unit. The inquest has heard the unit is "over capacity all the time."

Coroner Megan Fairweather is examining the deaths of Barry Ellery, 77, Miranda Meyer, 37, and Kendal Quicke, 31.

The inquest heard a trainee psychiatrist was carrying 11 to 13 inpatients — the recommended load is four to five. Mental health patients were regularly placed on the thoracic ward. A 2024 review found the wards were "no longer fit for purpose."

Clinicians carrying triple a safe caseload aren't failing. They're being set up to fail — and patients pay for it.

Our condolences to the families of Barry, Miranda and Kendal.

🔗 Report via The Courier-Mail: https://hubs.la/Q04tw5gC0

If this raises issues for you, support is available: Lifeline 13 11 14 | Nurse & Midwife Support 1800 667 877

19/08/2026

$93.1 million for 53 specialist mental health nurses in Queensland EDs. We welcome it. Now finish the job.

These nurses are skilled at de-escalation, and having them in EDs will make patients and staff safer. That's real.

But it doesn't answer the question NPAA has been putting to Queensland Health for over a year: where is the bed?

In July 2025 we wrote about mental health patients held in Gladstone ED for more than 120 hours waiting for an acute bed in Rockhampton — no therapeutic care, no fresh air, sedation used to manage distress the environment itself created. We've written the same letter about Darling Downs, Bundaberg and Hervey Bay.

A specialist nurse can hold someone through a crisis. She cannot conjure an inpatient bed that doesn't exist. And the funding is $93.1 million over four years across a state with more than 100 emergency departments — if those roles are staffed around the clock, that is enough to cover roughly ten hospitals.

So we're asking the Minister for three things: publish a maximum ED length of stay for mental health patients, tell us how many new acute mental health beds are coming and when, and confirm this cover is 24/7, not business hours.

Over to our members: has anything actually changed in your ED? What's the longest you've seen a mental health patient wait for a bed this year? Tell us below or message us privately — your experience is what we take to the Minister.

🔗 Report via The Courier-Mail: https://hubs.la/Q04tw62c0

19/08/2026

A resident called the police. Not for a crime — because no one answered their call bell.

That's in today's Mercury/News Corp investigation into Australia's aged care homes, and it is one of the less confronting things in it.

Whistleblowers — workers, families and residents — have lodged more than 2,000 reports of understaffing since July last year. Among them:

• A man left with faeces "half way up his back and up his front"
• In South Australia, residents not attended to until after 3pm — up to eight hours in a soiled pad
• In NSW, residents left lying in wet beds and faeces for hours
• In Victoria, a resident left on the floor for an extended period
• A Queensland worker alleging residents were dying of negligence, with the cause passed off as "old age"

Mandy Smith, 63, an aged care worker on the Gold Coast, described a shift most of our members would recognise instantly: "Sometimes, I've got one resident on the toilet in one bathroom and another in another bathroom and I am running between them."

Let's be clear about what this is. This is not a workforce that stopped caring. This is a workforce that has been set an impossible task and then blamed for the consequences.

Around 40% of facilities publicly report they are not meeting mandated care minutes — and there are credible claims that some providers are using accounting tricks to look compliant on paper while cutting shifts on the floor. Meanwhile we're staring down a projected shortfall of 110,000 personal care workers by 2030, and the average wait for an aged care home place has blown out to 356 days.

NPAA is calling for:

• Independent verification of care minutes reporting — not self-reported figures taken at face value
• Real consequences for providers who fail to meet them, and public naming of those who do
• Registered nurse-led skill mix that reflects the acuity actually walking through the door
• Genuine protection for workers who speak up, so raising the alarm doesn't cost you your job

Over to you: if you work in aged care, what would actually change your shift tomorrow — more staff on the floor, a better skill mix, less paperwork, or protection to speak up without fear? Tell us in the comments.

🔗 Investigation via The Mercury: https://hubs.la/Q04tw3ct0