National Ophthalmic Nurse Competencies Project

Following AONA’s involvement in the Department of Human Services review of Ophthalmology services across Victoria in 2004, the Victorian committee believes them association, in collaboration with other professional nursing bodies such as the Royal College of Nurses Australia, is in a valuable position to bring together the expertise and contributions of Ophthalmic nurses in the field to form a competencies structure for Ophthalmic nursing not only in Victoria but across Australia.

We anticipate this will help provide a framework for practice and education, consistency in patient care and provide a personal career development pathway for nurses in the specialty.

Representatives from Queensland, NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, Western Australia and New Zealand attended the initial meeting to discuss this held on Sunday 8th October, 2006. Representing NSW were Cheryl Moore and Janet Long.

Janet Marsden, Nursing Practitioner in the Emergency Department of Manchester Royal Eye Hospital, senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Chair of the Royal College of Nursing, UK Ophthalmic Nursing Forum spoke on the value of defining competencies, the process of developing them and the benefits. She stressed the importance of a unified voice, lest we give bureaucrats an opportunity to sabotage our efforts by playing one state off against another.

Competencies breakfast meeting, Melbourne

At that meeting, it was decided to form a national group called the "National Co-Ordination Committee" (NCOC). This will not be a separate organisation but a group made up of 2-3 committee members from each State to work on issues that relate to us all.

One of the barriers to a unified stance was that we were all unaware of what was happening in other states. There was overlap and duplication of work that was more appropriately shared / pooled. It was agreed that communication would be enhanced if each state’s AONA newsletter was available across the states. Eventually, it may be feasible to produce a high quality National AONA newsletter / magazine with local news from each state. However, initially all editors would simply email theirs to Janet Long in NSW and then it would be put together as one document and send back to each state for distribution. No extra cost would then be incurred by the states for their mail outs.

Since much of the baseline data we need to collect is from our members, it was proposed that we could form a national database of all AONA members Australia wide. There are privacy issues here and we need permission from each member to share their details but this will be further discussed and can be addressed over 2007 as people renew their registration.

In addition to this there was talk regarding "what is an ophthalmic nurse?" Where do they work and what skills, education and experience do they have that make them an ophthalmic nurse? Melbourne did a survey at the conference on this so that we can start to gather data. It will be sent soon to all members across Australia via state branches and further discussions will take place in NCOC regarding this issue

Janet Marsden addressing the meeting.

A Framework for National Ophthalmic Nurse Competencies has already been written by the UK working group. These are available from either Cheryl Moore or Janet Long. They were presented by Janet Marsden at the AONA Vic conference in October. They are divided into core or basic competencies, more advanced / specialty area competencies (theatre skills, emergency skills) and expert practice skills (nurse practitioner). Some amendments will need to be made to adapt them to suit Australian legislation, demographics and career structure. However, there was generally very positive feedback from Australian members.
We have been given permission from the RCN (UK) to use these competencies as a framework from our own.