August 2025

Skill mix is one critical factor which contributes to the overall safe staffing or a clinical unit and translates into safe and quality care provision

Delicately balancing the skill mix is a shift by shift, daily, weekly and monthly matter for nurse unit managers to ensure staff and patient safety is maintained

The challenge with ensuring appropriate skill mix is that there may be vacant positions which skews the skill mix – you may have too few experienced staff to support new practitioners, practitioners transitioning specialties e.g. surgical to oncology or a constantly changing skill mix due to reliance on agency staff which are currently only being signed off for 3 months at time.

Despite multiple commitments by the Government to implement clinical coaches to support the skill mix and be an available resource to support those new learners or those needing to develop their specialty skills, no funding has been forthcoming and these roles are having be implemented out of an already stretched budget and from an establishment that already has vacancies.

The implications of an inappropriate skill mix are dire. New graduates are leaving due to feeling unsupported, those transitioning into speciality units are not able to achieve specialised skills sets in a timely way and staff feel generally unsupported with experienced staff feeling burnt out from continual orientation and tyring to support staff and patient care.

 Emily Shepherd,
ANMF Tasmanian Branch Secretary

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