My Health Career is pleased to present a guest article from Carol Mudford. Carol is a nursing student at Charles Sturt University, and one of the Founding Co-Presidents of the new Australian Student and Novice Nurse Association (ASANNA membership is free). Carol is a member of the 2013 intake for the Emerging Nurse Leader Program, and has been an active Council member of the National Rural Health Student Network whilst studying. She loves travel, crafternoons, and exploring the remote parts of the world…..

Hi! It is a pleasure to be able to introduce you to ASANNA – the Australian Student and Novice Nurse Association. I started studying nursing in 2011 simply because I was looking for a skill and a job that would make me useful. I wanted a career that I could travel with, and to be totally honest, I wanted to feel good by being able to make a positive difference in other people’s lives. I never, ever, imagined I would (or could) earn leadership awards, or play a part in establishing a national organisation for student and novice nurses. In fact, I thought there must already be one.

The fact that there hasn’t been a national representative group for student nurses surprised me. I was struck by this while sitting amongst a big group of health students at a meeting of the National Rural Health Student Network, and we were being introduced to the other health student organisations. They were each telling us about their activities, events and advocacy work, the professional organisations they work with, and their membership. And there was no nursing group there. Hang on! Where are the nurses? Oh, there isn’t a nursing group? How come? Not sure… All I thought at the time though was, “Oh well”.

However, around the same time I started realising how many issues were facing healthcare, and nursing in particular. At the end of 2012 we started hearing that a massive number of nursing graduates were struggling to find work. But isn’t there a shortage of nurses, I thought? Isn’t this the job that’s guaranteed? That we can get work anywhere with? And aren’t nurses, ah, needed? Still, I didn’t think there was anything that I could do about such big issues, especially being ‘just a student’.

I had lived my teens and early twenties exploring the world, the creative arts, the outdoors and the somewhat privileged freedom of doing, being and going wherever I wanted. After school I had studied an Arts degree which led to a series of varied jobs whilst travelling (e.g. racehorse exerciser, projectionist, waitress, quit smoking leaflet hander-outer, etc). And while I’m a fervent advocate for the value of Arts degrees, I was surprisingly happy to realise that I wanted to chase a somewhat conventional nursing career. Then, to realise that this sensible, reliable and worthy career choice might not be so reliable after all was astounding!

Could I do something?

I grew up in a farming family, and our attitude to life was always: if you see something needs doing, you do it. So my own values were telling me that if I saw a problem, I had to look for the solution. And a sneaky thought entered my mind: that a national student association for nurses could help. Now admittedly, nursing students have had access to the strong professional nursing organisations for as long as they have been representing working nurses. Yet I was actively involved in numerous student networks, and our student voice wasn’t being heard. No one knew about the graduate nursing crisis. In fact, most nursing graduates didn’t know about the graduate crisis until they were rejected from jobs. Nurses were also often seen as passive, disengaged, and disinterested. But this didn’t match the inspiring, driven, passionate and proactive nurses that I was meeting!

Fortunately, I was not the only person thinking like this. At the Future Health Leader’s first conference I met an early career nurse, Stephanie Jeremy. Steph and I had had a similar student experience a couple of years (and states) apart from each other, and we were seeing and thinking the same things: nurses needed student representation, and now was the time for it. And, she had actually started working on it. Wonderful!

So, a long story short, we joined forces with a number of passionate people across Australia and in 2013 we were very excited to establish ASANNA – the Australian Student and Novice Nurse Association. ASANNA is growing a national network of university student clubs, and novice nurse regions, that are all about bringing everyone together. We are giving voice to student and early career nurses, whilst connecting us with our profession and the wider healthcare community in a supportive, engaging way. ASANNA will champion our current issues, such as the shortage of grad jobs, whilst also creating sustainable ways for us to support ourselves through the transition from student to professional nurses.

To this aim we welcome early career nurses to our membership, up to 5 years post-studies. We believe new nurses can offer great support and mentoring for students and newgrads, whilst knowing that this group of new nurses also need support themselves. The statistics tell us that the greatest number of nurses choosing to leave the profession are in the first 5 years of their work. So, whilst a lot of us are fighting hard to get our first jobs, it seems those of us that do get a foot in the door, are leaving not long after. There are many reasons for this, and we feel that ASANNA can play an important role to support these early career nurses, in the hope that this will help them to stay in the profession. We know that nursing is a powerful, meaningful and rewarding career choice, and we want to support our peers to enter, and remain in, the profession.

We’d love to hear any ideas or suggestions about how you think ASANNA can support you as a student, potential student, novice nurse, nurse educator or employer. Whichever profession you pursue for your career, I strongly encourage you all to join your relevant student associations. Getting involved in your student organisations opens up a whole new world of opportunity, to a broader perspective on your future career, and access to networks, new friends and support across Australia. But nursing is the best! ;)

ASANNA membership is free, and you can join our discussions on Facebook at www.facebook.com.au/AsannaNurses  or twitter: @AsannaNurses