Professor Mei Krishasamy is an internationally recognised cancer nurse and respected cancer nurse researcher in patient experiences and outcomes research. She is VCCC Research and Education Lead, Nursing, Professor/Director, Academic Nursing Unit, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, and inaugural Chair in Cancer Nursing in the Department of Nursing at the University of Melbourne. In 2018 Mei was awarded a Life Fellowship by the Cancer Nurses Society of Australia. Here, she challenges the notion of 'women's work'.
The WHO State of the World’s Nursing 2020 report calls for the creation of at least 6,000,000 new nursing jobs worldwide by 2030, and massive acceleration of nursing education. Why? Quite simply - “to keep the world healthy”.
The ability to respond to this urgent call to arms will require considerable leadership, advocacy, and investment in nursing from politicians, policymakers, world banks, big business, communities, health care administrators, multidisciplinary health care providers, education providers, and the public – informed and enabled by nurses and midwives. Delivering against this opportunity to strengthen global health, demands that everyone steps up and applies the theme of this years’ International Women’s Day - Choose to Challenge.
Nursing, universally considered to be women’s work, is undervalued and underpaid. In high-income countries like Australia, the US and UK, nurses are among the lowest-paid (the lowest in the UK) healthcare professionals and compared with other occupations, their salary increases less over the course of their careers.
Of the 365,990 nurses and midwives in Australia, men make up only 11.75 per cent of the professional workforce, and yet male nurses disproportionately hold more senior nursing positions across practice settings, positions, and almost all specialties, and are more highly paid than female nurses – between 8 and 17 per cent more. Despite women making up almost 90 per cent of all nurses, less than a third of us hold senior positions.
"Nurses are the backbone of any health system."
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, WHO State of the World's Nursing report
A 2018 headline report in the UK Nursing Times read, “No progress in media representation of nursing over last 20 years”, with persistent imagery of nursing as angels, reinforcing traits such as kindness and selflessness – rather than the reality of modern-day nurses as well-educated, highly skilled professionals. Interestingly the pandemic has brought new imagery of nurses as heroes, but across the globe they are asking why they are branded this way when they are doing what they have always done, suggesting perhaps how little is understood about our work.
As nurses, we know what we have always done; we know our value and power, and despite robust and irrefutable evidence demonstrating poorer patient outcomes, greater health inefficiencies, and higher death rates when nurses are constrained in their work, the profession is still all too often undervalued, silenced and invisible.
But we can choose to challenge, and one of the most powerful ways in which we can do this is by leading, informing and driving nursing research to make visible our impact.
In Australia today there is little if any career opportunity for nurses who aspire to be clinician-researchers. For our expert clinical nurses who want to develop and lead their own program of research, often they have to choose to leave their clinical work to pursue this goal.
In Victoria, nursing is one, if not the only health professional discipline with no allocation of dedicated research time in their enterprise bargaining agreement; the message perhaps that nurses don’t need to be researchers – just carers. If nurses are indeed the backbone of any health system, then we need that backbone to be strong, dependable and responsive. To be this, we need evidence to be able to deliver exemplary care, drive innovation, influence, and lead cultural change where nursing and women’s work is recognised as the global force for health for all.
If you are interested in knowing more about nurse-led research, learning research skills and networking with other nurses passionate about clinical research, find out how the VCCC is investing in nurses and nursing research through the VCCC Nurse-Led Research Innovation Hub.
Mei was recently appointed Co-Chair of the VCCC Strategic Program Steering Group - Program 9 Leadership Development.
