In 2015 at a session at the Creating Futures conference, a First Nations woman stood up and said something like, “We know you whitefellas must love my mob, because you’re always interfering in our lives. Thanks, but we could take care of ourselves if you would just let us.”

I reckon I have a small, whitefella-style, taste of how she feels.

Every year nurses pay a registration fee to AHPRA. I’m cool with that – I have friends. I know that tradies, aircraft engineers, deck officers, doctors, builders, architects and teachers all pay registration fees too. It’s part of being a professional.

Every year I take the option to schedule my AHPRA fee payment so it goes through a couple of days before it’s due. That’s the way I pay all my bills. How cool is BPAY? #organised

Every year I get repeat reminders from the nursing hierarchy and AHPRA that there is a fee due in a few weeks time. I’ve had three such emails in the last 24 hours.

I don’t know why they spend so much time to remind me to pay a bill weeks before it becomes due, but anyway… I know that they must love me, because they keep on interfering in my scheduled fee payment each year. I don’t know how they think I manage in other parts of my bill-paying life: they must stay awake all night worrying about my mortgage, electricity, car registration, and insurance bills.

Which brings me to this thought:

Why don’t nurses trust Australia’s most trusted profession (nurses)?

Nurses were rated the most trusted profession for 23 consecutive years (1994 to 2017) in Australia, according to a Roy Morgan poll [source]. In 2019 the ABC surveyed 54,000 Australians and also found that nurses, together with doctors, were the most trusted professions [source].

Despite that, the management level above me and my registration body do not seem to trust me to pay my annual fee. In the last 24 hours I’ve received three emails telling me to pay a bill that’s not due until the end of the month. Weird, right?

Is it just a quirk of doting, caring people who love us so greatly that they worry about us too much?

Yeah – maybe that’s it.

Recommended Reading

Darbyshire, P. & Thompson, D.R. (2021), Can nursing educators learn to trust the world’s most trusted profession?. Nursing Inquiry, 28:e12412. 
https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12412

End

That’s it for this quick rant.

As always, feel free to leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Oh, and don’t forget to pay you AHPRA registration when it’s due, and not a day before. 🙂

Paul McNamara, 19 May 2021

Short URL meta4RN.com/trust