Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care, press conference – 28 February 2025

GED KEARNEY, ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE: I'm the Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care and the Assistant Minister for First Nations Health. And I'm incredibly pleased to be here with a number of important people. We have Professor Andrew Stripp, the Group Chief Executive at Epworth Healthcare. We have Kate Gillan, Adjunct Professor, Executive Director of Clinical Services and the Chief Nursing Officer. Nicole Argall, Adjunct Professor- Adjunct Associate Professor and group director, clinical education and dean of the nursing academy. We have Professor Robert Pike, provost and Senior Vice President at La Trobe University. And we are well represented- Deakin University is represented here, and we have our wonderful nurses here with us today. Mairead, I believe you're going to say something a bit later.
 
So, this is a very special announcement today as a former- well, actually, I'm still a nurse. Once a nurse, always a nurse. But as a nurse of 20 years, I know how incredibly important it is to upgrade and keep your skills ahead of technological advancements, of care changes. Updating is a really important part of maintaining your skilled nursing and midwifery workforce. But not only that, it's an important way to help with burnout. We know that a lot of our nursing and midwifery workforce get very tired, particularly coming off the back of COVID. There was a lot of burnout.
 
An important part of retention is actually that offering of upskilling and ongoing education. And Epworth, very pleased to say, have recognised the importance of the nursing and midwifery workforce. I personally would say they are the backbone of the health system but I might be biased. And Epworth have invested in the Brookes Academy, which is a wonderful institution that provides that upskilling and education for their nursing and midwifery workforce. I've just had a little glimpse here of the facilities that they have already. But we, the Federal Labor Government, are pleased to announce that we will invest $28 million in building a brand new state of the art building that the Brookes Academy will be able to operate from.
 
Now, this will mean that nurses across Victoria, and indeed maybe across the country, will have access to a wonderful education facility that will offer technical advancements so that distance learning can occur, so people in rural and regional areas will be able to access the learning from the Brookes Institute. This is a great advancement. It will mean that- it is an investment in our nurses, an investment in our midwives. And of course, ultimately an investment in the high quality healthcare that is provided to Australians. There's nothing better than investing in our workforce, and the Albanese Labor government has made major investments in our workforce because we know we can't have a robust, solid healthcare system without well skilled nurses, midwives, doctors and allied health professionals.
 
So this investment is on the back of millions of dollars of investments in upskilling GPs right across the country, particularly in maintaining our rural and regional GP workforce. We've had record numbers of doctors enrolling in government funded general practice courses, particularly in rural and remote areas, and we have provided excellent incentives for that to happen. We've invested millions of dollars in scholarships for nurses and nurse practitioners and midwives to upskill, and we are making sure that Australia's health workforce can be accessed by as many Australians as possible. So we really welcome this development at the Epworth. We think it's a great investment in our nurses and midwives, and we're very excited to be partnering with the Epworth, who will be partnering with universities like La Trobe University and Deakin University, to make sure that the training and education that is received here is recognised at that level.
 
So thanks very much for coming along today and I will be handing over, I believe, to Nicole now who tell us a bit more about the academy.
 
NICOLE ARGALL, BROOKES ACADEMY: Thank you. Thanks so much. I'm incredibly proud to lead the work of the Brookes Academy for Nursing and Midwifery at Epworth. This really is amazing an amazing investment in our nurses and midwives who really are the backbone of our healthcare service. And it would not be possible without the incredible investment of our donors who support our nurses and midwives to achieve what they would like to achieve in relation to professional development opportunities. We really focus on clinical pathways and partner with our university partners, as Ged has mentioned, but we also really focus on the leadership pathways and we are investing in our nurses and midwives right through from when they are a graduate, right through to a senior nursing leader. And we are really setting up for investing in the nurses and midwives of the future. Thank you.
 
And I'd like to introduce Mairead, who is one of our midwives over at Epworth Freemasons who's going to talk to you today.
 
MAIREAD: Hello, my name is Mairead, I'm a registered nurse and midwife at Epworth Freemasons, and I've been with Epworth for five years now. I'm one of the recipients of the Brookes Academy scholarship for the postgraduate in midwifery. It's not only just about the funding to help us to complete our studies, but knowing that we've got a group of people behind us that believe in the work that we're doing, that what we're doing matters, and that they want to help us to provide excellent care to our patients and to help bring up the next generation of nurses and midwives. Thank you.
 
ARGALL: Do you have any questions?
 
JOURNALIST: Yeah, great. Can you tell me a little bit more about who actually accesses this academy? Is it all nurses who undergo their training at a certain university, or who's it for?
 
ARGALL: Sure. It's for all nurses. It's for all nurses and midwives at Epworth. But we are also looking at supporting nurses and midwives more broadly throughout the state of Victoria and really looking at opportunities to expand our reach, to make sure that all nurses and midwives can benefit.
 
JOURNALIST: So, do all nurses and midwives need a scholarship to access the training?
 
ARGALL: No, not at all. So, any nurse and midwife that's employed at Epworth has access to our academy programmes as part of their work here. We're certainly looking at expanding that out, and we are also offering rural and regional partnerships. But also, if our nurses and midwives here at Epworth are wishing to move into postgraduate studies, one of the barriers for postgraduate study is the financial implications. So we offer full scholarships for nurses and midwives that are wishing to continue on at a postgraduate level.
 
JOURNALIST: And Ged, if I could, is this new money or is it money that's already been put aside?
 
KEARNEY: This money was put aside in the- I believe in the last budget. So the money has been allocated to this project, but we are very pleased to announce it today.
 
JOURNALIST: And what else is Labor doing to retain nurses? We know that the workforce is burnt out. There is trouble retaining nurses. So what else is Labor doing?
 
KEARNEY: Labor Government has made a, I would like to say, historic investment in our nursing and midwifery workforce. Just last year, we announced $50 million in scholarships to help nurses and midwives upgrade to nurse practitioners and endorsed midwives, which means that they have a higher level of skill and can provide independent services to our community. 
 
JOURNALIST: Indistinct
 
KEARNEY: Anyway, this is- we have invested millions of dollars in upskilling nurses and midwives right across the country. We are incredibly proud of our nurses and midwives. They go a long way to making sure that people can access excellent healthcare. We've also invested millions of dollars in upskilling our general practitioners, because we know that they are an incredibly important part of our primary healthcare workforce. We have invested our- making sure that general practitioners can access things like paid parental leave when they're training to be specialist GPs, that they can access paid leave when they are working, that they have incentives to work in our rural and remote areas and our regions. No other government, I believe, has made such a massive investment in our health workforce.
 
JOURNALIST: And this money is for a new building, but are you hoping that it means more people will go through the system in terms of this training?
 
KEARNEY: Well, we know that Epworth employ around 4000 nurses, 4000 nurses - that's a lot of nurses and midwives that will be able to access this straight away. And it's great news to hear that their partnership with the universities will mean that this may well be expanded beyond that. Anything, I think any programme that is committed to upskilling our nurses and midwives is a good thing for this community. It's a good thing for the health system, and it's a good thing for Australians.
 
JOURNALIST: Is this upcoming election going to be one that is about health, do you think?
 
KEARNEY: I think that Australians really value Medicare. Uh, we know that. They think Medicare is an incredibly important part of our health infrastructure, and never before have we had a government invest more in Medicare. The latest investment in ensuring that nine out of ten Australians will be able to access bulk billing by 2030 is a massive investment. This is the biggest investment in Medicare since its inception. We know that accessing bulk billing absolutely was in free fall after the last government, after six years of freezing the Medicare rebate. And we know that Australians in a cost of living crisis were making extremely hard decisions about accessing healthcare. Can I afford to go to the doctor, or can I afford to buy that really important item for my child's education? These are decisions that Australians should not be making. We want to make sure that every Australian can access bulk billing, can access a doctor when and where they need it. And we have made, as I said, the largest investment in bulk billing in this country since the inception of Medicare.
 
JOURNALIST: Thank you. That's all my questions.