Graduate Nurses

May you all be graduates who care about those to whom you are ministering.

May you all be people persons who are empathetic and humanistic in your manner of dealing with those in your care.

May you not let call bells ring for countless minutes before being answered. May you administer prescribed medications on time.

May you not shy from unpleasant nursing tasks, hoping that others will attend patient needs that are distasteful.

If on the service desk, may you respond to calls made by anxious relatives.

May you learn to speak in modulated tones, remembering that the volume of noise generated by loud talking and raucous laugher can be very disturbing to patients.

May you be staff remembered with appreciation by those with whom you are dealing.

Pointles Living

To me

At the moment

And for some time past

Life has lost all of its meaning.

Although alive and breathing

I am in a constant state of melancholy

There seems little point in living

I feel that I am waiting to die.

With that passing

Will come blessed oblivion

To the cares and worries

The concerns about relevance and meaning

That have become a part

Of my latter days.

With my mortal coil perished,

Sweet oblivion n

And anonymity,

Will mark the endpoint,

Of my time on Earth.

Along with the millions.

The tens of millions who have gone before,

I will become a memory,

That will fade

Into nothingness.

The entitlement to access euthasia provisions, with the passing of NSW Legislation, has now been provided for citizens in all Australian states. However, those of us in the NT and ACT continue to be nobbled by the federal government’s controlling caprices. PM Scott Morrison justified this during a radio interview (19/5). He said that territory citizens were ‘different’ to those living in the states. He inferred that these differences justified our exclusion from this entitlement.

The overturning of the Northern Territory Voluntary Euthanasia Bill of 1996 by Canberra the following year was both callous and cruelly indifferent.

My fervent hope is that with Labor winning the Australian election, an Albanese lead government will reinstate a territory legislative entitlement savagely stripped away by Canberra 25 years ago

There comes a time,

When it is time to cast,

Aside the trappings and the memorabilia,

The cards of appreciation,

The letters of thanks,

The pictures of people taken together,

Accumulated down the occupational years,

Which are part of a redundant history,

A period no longer relevant,

When the only thing left to gather on heaping files,

And settle on drawers full of history,

Is dust.

Times have now passed,

When that all burned brightly,

On occupational front burners,

When retirement was an experience and deep reflection,

On the years that had gone before,

But decades on,

With memories of what was, growing fainter,

It can be time to quit the accumulation,

To consign it to the tip of landfill waste,

To go back over time and to forever live on past memories,

Means that going forward as one should,

Cannot happen.

Memories of what went before,

Notwithstanding material reminders,

Burn less and less with the passing of years,

There are flashes of recall, revisitation to events,

But the mind and its internal reflections,

Move on with age, leaving behind what was,

Sometimes offering vivid but brief recall,

More often diffusing the sharpness of memories,

Dulled by age and tarnished by distance,

From happenings of the past,

Now history.

My thought in reply to a Linked In post from Scott Morrison today.

Thank you for your sentiments Mr Morrison. This was the way it was always going to go because liberal parties within Australia sell themselves short by infighting. I imagine there will be a bi-election in Cook before too long. There is much soul searching and healing that needs to take place within your party and that will not happen any time soon. With respect, your party is short on for leadership talent with synergestic focus. The centre of your party, the parliamentary wing, has lost its way.

I don’t know how good the new government will be but if it wants to succeed,it must develop an internal unity and oneness of purpose that came to evade your government.

Campaigning does not come into the shaping of voters perceptions that have been impacted by days, weeks, months and years. It is this long term development of regard and appreciation that eventually determines how well an incumbent government will fare when voters go to the polls.

I recommend a paper written by Frederick Wirt and shared with participants at the ACEL conference held in Darwin in 1992. Titled ‘will the centre hold’, it predicted what can happen when organisations are more concerned about magnification and image than consolidated and logical development.

M

If a re-elected Prime Minister unlocks superannuation programs allowing people access to super savings for house purchases, he will be committing a massive blunder. It has already happened once, with people able to draw down on superannuation during the Covid epidemic of 2020. This depletion of savings and the compounding interest they attract, will never be recovered.

I became a superannuation fund member in 1975. Then aged 29, I could not see much point in super programs, for one’s working and earning life had many decades to run. Now aged 76 and 10 years into my retirement years, I am thankful every day for investing in a secure financial future through superannuation.

Please PM and political leaders, don’t let people prematurely break into their super funds. Such an allowance will abort the financial security they deserve during their retirement years.

The NT News story (Territory kids walk to school safely 17/5)

reinforced the fact that male teachers and principals need to be constantly on guard against community perceptions that can misinterpret and misconstrue their social behaviours. It was perfectly natural for Acting Larrakeyah School Principal Natasha Guse to be photographed holding the hands of two girls in preparation for this year’s ‘walk to school safely’ day. In fact, it would have been wholly appropriate for any female principal to have been in the promotional photograph.

That would not have been acceptable if the principal had been a male. At the very least, eyebrows would have been raised and there may have been more in depth questioning and follow up. A male principal holding hands or making physical context with students in such a photo could at the very least, expect to be counselled about the need for behavioural propriety.

Males connected with teaching in these modern times are faced with barriers and limitations on conduct that do not impact upon female teachers and educators. With the passing of years, those stringencies are becoming more pronounced.

J

With the build-up to the federal election and everything that has been happening on the local political scene, a very important and significant event has almost been overlooked. Between May 10 and 20 the 2022 NAPLAN program is taking place. Students in years 3,5, 7 and 9 are sitting their literacy and numeracy tests for this year. They, together with their teachers will be glad when the program concludes for this year.

Sadly, school and system leaders will then begin champing at the bit, anticipating outcomes. Judging school effectiveness on the basis of test results which were once advertised as being a minor ‘point in time’ assessment, over inflates the value of this testing regime. Sadly, too many children spend far too many weeks and even months before the tests in pre-test, practice and readiness mode. By the time tests are administered, they are often stale and probably do less well than would be the case if they were not so encumbered with this readiness strategy.

The over-emphasis on NAPLAN detracts from schools and diminishes education as a whole.

• The best person to approach in most situations is the school’s Registrar or Financial Manager. That is certainly the case with primary schools. Some Middle and Senior Schools may have a person other than the Finance Administrator delegated to handle contracts. That would be passed onto you on inquiry by whoever answered your call if making contact by phone.

• My thought would be that you phone and ask for an appointment to share your business proposition. The school type and size will determine who you speak with when an appointment is made.

• You might offer to share your website ahead of any meeting but in any case that address would probably be on your business card.

• I always respected businesses approaching our school to have arranged for referees contact. (Sometimes referees who are contacted can be surprised by the fact they have not been asked to provide feedback to an enquiring person.)

• Schools quickly turn off approaching businesses which take too much time to carry out work once a job has been arranged. At Leanyer, we went through a number of plumbing contractors before settling on Town and Country. T and C were always prompt, staff were courteous and worked around our school timetable. Accounts were clearly explained and charges reasonable. I think Leanyer still uses Town and Country.

• The impression left by those carrying out work is important. Language levels and ‘quality’ comes into play. Dress codes need to be appropriate to a school environment and it is important for workers to sign in and out before work is undertaken and once the job is complete. Ochre cards are usually requested even when direct contact by workers with children is not envisaged.

• Registrars and administrative staff have strong network connections with peers in other schools. Conversations might well embrace a comparison of the way in which contractors carry out work in particular schools. That ‘word of mouth’ contact can be both positive and negative, and may determine whether a school will or won’t approach particular businesses to carry out work.

• Schools value contractors who offer a decent level of service at a fair and reasonable price. There are some who think that schools can afford any level of charge. In these days of budget stringency that is far from being the case.

Today I feel very low and very flat. I am finding it harder and harder to feel worthwhile and am saddened by the fact that people in positions of caring for others seem no longer to care. Sympathy and empathy are dead qualities. There seems to be no way forward in care for people terms. I just feel the future is dead and that genuine ministration no longer counts for anything at all. The genuine spirit of care is dead.