Four nurse practitioners work alongside the team of general practitioners at Seymour Health, along with a number of nurses still completing their training to take that next step.
Director of medical services Dean Pritchard said nurse practitioners brought a combination of different perspectives to their practice.
“Nurse practitioners are trained as nurses, so they have the nursing perspective, which really focuses on that holistic (care), it’s more than just the assessment and prescription of treatments, it goes far deeper than that,” Dr Pritchard said.
“They’ve got that nursing training, and then they’ve decided — usually through frustration because they can see what a patient needs and what they want to prescribe or contribute — and then they go and do their training.”
For Sarah Ridd, who has served as a nurse practitioner for three years and has spent seven years total working at Seymour Health, training to get where she is now involved about three to four years of study, along with extensive hours of observed practice until she was signed off by a qualified nurse practitioner.
Ms Ridd said she made the decision to take the leap to expand the care she provided the community.
“I was doing a bit of management work at the time but it just really wasn’t for me,” she said.
“I was enjoying the clinical side, the clinical challenges more so, and just that hands-on nursing.
“It was organically the next step for me where I just wanted to expand my scope of practice and help the community a bit more.”
For Seymour Health, Dr Pritchard said nurse practitioners were a vital part of the hospital’s model.
Lacking, like most regional hospitals, some of the resources that metropolitan services can provide, nurse practitioners are able to step in when GPs, who work across the clinic and hospital, are unavailable.
“Having a team together where nurse practitioners can sub in when that (GP) team is just not big enough to provide the service is excellent,” Dr Pritchard said.
Ms Ridd added that it benefited the community to have more practitioners who were available to provide support.
“I feel like we contribute a bit more to the community because we’re more available — we’ve got nurse practitioners on site a lot of the days of the week, so when people can’t get into the GP or if there’s something that is a bit more urgent, they can just have that care delivered,” she said.
From Monday, December 8 to Sunday, December 14, Nurse Practitioner Week is being celebrated at hospitals across the country.
Locally, Seymour Health is well and truly expressing its gratitude for its dedicated team of four.
“There will always be a place for nurse practitioners at Seymour Health,” Dr Pritchard said.
“I want to thank them for their dedication to regional and rural health, where medical practitioners have not always been as willing to step into that place, they provide the very foundation of healthcare in rural and regional teams.
“Health services like Seymour, which can struggle to operate, are so much stronger because they are here.”
