Issues in Australian Health Services - Essay Example

Australia has many problems in the healthcare system of today, very much like many other countries in the world . In an effort to determine what the top issues for this system are, a survey was done. This survey was posted on Google Master and healthcare workers were informed that it was available. The goal was five responses and twelve actually responded all professionals and all but two were RNs. This paper will take the results of this survey and compare the top three issues to the research.

(Note full results of survey in Appendix A). The top three issues as noted in the survey of professionals in the system were, in this order, the increasing aging population including the aging of the healthcare workforce itself, lack of adequate funding to meet the needs of the community or to incentivize nurses to join or remain in the system, and access to health care for rural Australians. All of these three issues, though they appear to be different are tied to two issues. The first is the nursing shortage and the second is the political atmosphere related to healthcare at this time.

Research supports the surveyed nurses and their concerns about healthcare in Australia. The biggest challenge at this time is the increased need for care causing a high demand when there are both financial and manpower shortages in the healthcare industry (Gray, Mell & Meinsch, 2009). There is a major shortage of carrers for an increasing number of paitents entering the system. According to Australian Nursing Federation (ANF, 2006). workers in aged care are less often supervised than they need to be based on the fact that there no one to supervise.

The Aged Care Assessment Team is becoming overwhelmed and the effect of that is shift to stigmatizing, targeting, and selecting of available care for those that most often need it (Gray, 2009). The second group that deals with this issue is the HACC (home and community care) which is a