New nursing expertise to aid children with cancer

A Christchurch nurse will be the country's first nurse practitioner in paediatric oncology.

New Zealand has trained 63 nurse practitioners – registered nurses with advanced training and responsibilities – since the role was introduced in December 2001.

The Ministry of Health sees them as a way to ease the load of doctors and plug a global shortage of health professionals.

However, a senior doctors' spokesman said nurse practitioners were not the answer to workforce issues.

Once fully trained, Jan Millar will be qualified to fully assess child patients and do many of the procedures currently limited to medical staff, such as lumbar punctures and bone marrow biopsies. Her role will also include prescribing a range of drugs to patients.

Millar qualified as a nurse in 1977 in England and moved on to specialise in working with sick children. When she first arrived in Christchurch in 1992, all child cancer patients were cared for in the surgical wards.

During a national restructure in child cancer services, Millar was instrumental in the creation of Christchurch Hospital's Children's Haematology and Oncology Centre, which opened in 2001.

Millar said she had seen a huge shift in survival rates for child cancer patients over time. In the 1970s, only about 60 per cent of children survived while now it was more like 80 per cent.

"People think it [work] must be really sad but it isn't, we achieve so much," she said.

Ministry of Health chief nurse Mark Jones said nurse practitioners were playing an increasingly important role in helping New Zealand meet the challenges facing the health system.

"They provide a sustainable and expert workforce that's flexible and provides great value for money. We need more of them," he said.

A Ministry of Health spokeswoman said nurse practitioners could free up doctors to work on more complex cases and provided a "sustainable solution" to ongoing workforce shortages.

The executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, Ian Powell, said it was great to have a more qualified nursing workforce, but nurse practitioners would have no impact on addressing doctor shortages.

He said there was an unrealistic expectation of the effect nurse practitioners could have on the workload of senior doctors and their numbers were still small.

"There hasn't really been an analysis on what precisely they would do that in some comprehensive significant way would actually impact on what doctors do," he said.

Millar said she was looking forward to returning to a more hands-on role after time doing mostly administration.

She said training and working as a nurse gave her a different perspective on treatment and patient interaction.

"Within health we've very much had defined roles. Doctors do this and nurses do that," she said. "The workforce is changing now."