Kath Schubach

Joseph Ischia: I’m talking urology with Kath Schubach who is a nurse practitioner in urology. She’s the vice president of ANZUNS and the convener of this year’s ANZUNS meeting. It’s a pleasure to have you in Kath. I was wondering if you can give us a couple of highlights of the nurses meeting this year.

Kath Schubach: Thanks very much Joe for inviting me in. I think the highlights for our meeting this year for both Carla and myself we’re trying to highlight the advance practice in nurse-led clinics and also some leadership in nursing, so one of our keynote speaker was a nurse practitioner in sexual health and just looking at their scopes of practice in the advanced scopes of practice, but also a theme of leadership overall so that the novice to the advance practice nurse could take something away from it.

Joseph: What’s been one of the major changes? Is it the nurse cystoscopist? Is that they have an increasing role at the clinic?

Kath: I think it’s an overall learning. And also, I think the partnership and the collaboration with the urologists because we know from research that with collaboration of both the nurse practitioner and the urologists that our patients have better outcomes with that.

Joseph: How many nurses are nurse practitioners? I know a lot of extra study goes into it. How many do we have in Australia?

Kath: Quite a few. Coming up in urology Of course, Helen Crowe leads the way as the first nurse practitioner in urology, but I think even the highlights of our presentations and the way how our program has grown, that it’s very, Sandra and I were talking about it, it’s about how we used to present case studies but now we’re actually presenting research and I think that’s really increasing our profile of professionalism of nursing.

Joseph: And the nurse practitioner role, I think it is one of the hot topics. How does that compare to, say, a urology CNC, clinical nurse consultants?

Kath: Well, I think we did discuss that and that was a theme that come out in our sessions and I think what it was, was it’s more about it’s not for everybody but there are lots of roles there. And if you’ve got a vision, whether it’s broad or narrow and a drive to pursue it, you can take any pathway. So, it doesn’t necessarily mean we all have to be nurse practitioners, but you can have fulfillment out of being a clinical nurse specialist and a consultant and many other roles within urology.

Joseph: Excellent. So, what was another one of the hot topics to come out of this year’s conference?

Kath: I think one thing that I think took a lot of people away was when Mia mentioned that “we’re not just a nurse.” And I think a lot of us describe ourselves as that and it’s about just how we’re going to articulate what we do as a nurse. One of the things that I took away from that was that she talked about personalized medicine and urology colleagues always talk about personalized medicine, but she said for us, to nurses, to look at nursing as a therapy. I just thought that that was really engaging and really something to think about.

Joseph: Okay that’s a couple of fantastic points and highlights from your meeting. So, what do you see is coming on down the track?

Kath: Well, again, I think it’s talking about nurses and what they’re going to pursue and how they’re going to pursue what we do as a profession and we’ll just take this further in Melbourne.

Joseph: That’s fantastic. Thank you very much Kath. It has been a pleasure chatting to you.

Kath: Thank you.