Nursing and midwifery regulation at work: Protecting the public in 2015/16

News

14 Mar 2017

A profession-specific annual report summary that looks into the work of the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia over the year to 30 June 2016 has now been published.

The report draws on data from the 2015/16 annual report by AHPRA and the National Boards.

This information provides an overview of the nursing and midwifery professions as at 30 June 2016, and includes the number of applications for registration, outcomes of criminal history checks and segmentation of the registrant base by gender, age, profession and division, and principal place of practice.

Notifications information includes the number of complaints or concerns received, matters open and closed during the year, types of complaint, monitoring and compliance and matters involving immediate action.

Insights into the profession include:

Of the 657,621 registered health practitioners in Australia in 2015/16, 380,208 were nurses and/or midwives (57.8% of the total registrant base).
29,699 held dual registration as a nurse and a midwife.
Registration for these professions grew by 2.7% over the year to 30 June 2016.
Student registration increased by 14.6%, to 93,569.
In 2015/16 there were 346,387 nurses; 88.5% women and 11.5% men.
There were 4,122 midwives; 99.6% women and 0.4% men.
Over 27% of nurses and midwives were based in New South Wales (104,721).
The Northern Territory (NT) was home to the least (4,378).
The age bracket with the most nurses and/or midwives was 55-59 (49,169).
19,379 nurses and/or midwives were under 25 years of age; 106 were aged 80 or over.
As part of the registration process, 36,140 criminal history checks were carried out for people wishing to register with AHPRA as a nurse and/or midwife. Of 1,977 disclosable court outcomes, six required regulatory action.
1,340 notifications (complaints or concerns) were lodged with AHPRA about nurses during the year. This represents 22.1% of all notifications received across all professions.
AHPRA received 95 notifications about midwives, equating to 1.6% of all notifications.
Immediate action to suspend or limit a nurse or midwife’s registration was taken by AHPRA 198 times in 2015/16.
There were 1,274 active monitoring cases about nurses and 144 active monitoring cases about midwives. The majority of these were about suitability/eligibility for registration.
87 new complaints were made about possible statutory offences relating to nursing and midwifery. Almost all new matters related to the use of protected titles.

To download this report, or to view the main 2015/16 annual report and summary reports by state or territory, visit our microsite.

For more information

Visit the AHPRA website
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For registration enquiries: 1300 419 495 (within Australia) +61 3 9275 9009 (overseas callers)
For media enquiries: (03) 8708 9200