With the number of nurses in New South Wales soon to fall short of patient demand, researchers at 91����’s School of Nursing and Midwifery are hard at work finding innovative ways to ensure those entering the profession are ready to join and fully participate in the workforce.

Tadesse Chinkie was drawn to a career in nursing. But when he came to Australia as a refugee from Ethiopia and began his studies at 91���� in 2016, he faced the language challenges common to many in the University’s ethnically-diverse student population.

Fortunately, the School of Nursing and Midwifery is leading a world-class research initiative into improving literacy and numeracy in the nursing workforce, said Professor Yenna Salamonson, one of the leaders of the Education and Workforce Research group, or EWER.

In one of their studies, the group has looked at the impact of students’ language abilities. “Our nursing students are very diverse — probably the most diverse in Australasia,” Salamonson said. And that has implications for student outcomes.

“At EWER, we’ve repeatedly found that we can predict student performance based on how much English they speak.” 

This was particularly evident among nursing students, more so than in other fields of study, such as engineering, which Salamonson said may reflect the focus on writing and essays in nursing programs.

Since then, the School has employed professional communication and academic literacy staff to aid nursing students, including Chinkie, who come from non English-speaking backgrounds. 

“They helped me a lot by checking my assignments and showing me how to study, how to do assignments and improve my essay writing,” says Chinkie who has passed every subject in his undergraduate nursing degree, and was awarded the Allianz Worldwide Partners Refugee Scholarship.

This is just one of several research projects and interventions that EWER has undertaken in their efforts to ensure that graduates are ready to join the nursing workforce.

Ensuring graduates are ready for the workforce in terms of language skills is one thing, but making sure they can operate successfully within it is another.  This is the subject of another EWER project, led by Salamonson, which investigates how a ‘clan’-type organisational culture, characterised by collaborative, family-like teams with shared goals and values, influences how a nursing workplace successfully functions.

“What we’ve found for nurses and midwives who perceive high ‘clan’ in their work environment, is that they report a better workplace safety culture. It also affects satisfaction,” Salamonson says. 

The challenge is figuring out how to encourage this collaborative ‘clan’ culture in nursing units. To that end, the EWER group is involved in an interventional study, in partnership with South Western Sydney Local Health District to see what approaches might facilitate this culture, and how that affects outcomes.

“At EWER, we’re identifying needs and working with our clinical colleagues to address them,” Salamonson says.