Elizabeth Dabars brings industrial/political heft to South Australian nurses' traditional struggle to be heard
Elizabeth Dabars, chief executive officer/secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation's South Austran branch, leading a protest outside the Royal Adelaide Hospital on North Terrace, Adelaide over emergency department waiting times.
A feature of protests over flaws in 21st Century South Australian public health service delivery has been the prominent role of the state’s branch of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation.
This coincided with Elizabeth Dabars taking on the role chief executive officer/secretary of the branch in 2008. Dabars, who graduated with a bachelor of nursing degree before working in metropolitan and country hospitals, also gained degrees in education and law. She worked as a worksite representative, organiser and industrial officer for the nurses federation and law firm Duncan Basheer Hannon. With extra qualifications in leadership and governance, Dabars was also adjunct associate professor with the University of South Australia.
A sign of Dabars’ protests irritating the state government was a personal targeting by the treasurer Rob Lucas of her salary in 2021 as the state’s highest paid union leader.
South Australia’s nurses have only been effectively exercising industrial clout since in the 1970s when they were still enduring poor conditions. But their first first move to get formal support for their roles, and to improve nursing standards and education, went back to the 1880s. Inspired the Australasian Trained Nurses Association being formed in New South Wales in 1899, the South Australian branch of the Royal British Nurses Association was founded.
In 1905, Kate Hill guided into being the South Australian branch of Australasian Trained Nurses Association. This became the Australian Nursing Federation in South Australia to protect the interests of trained nurses and to establish an Australian system for nurse registration.
A state-based system for nurse registration was adopted in 1920, ending the practice of nurses receiving certificates from the hospitals where they trained or from nusres associations. The need for a national Australian Nursing Federation was fulfilled in 1924. South Australia was the first state to set up a nurses registration board to arrange training and examinations of every nurses.
The Australian Nurses Federation gained membership to the International Council of Nurses in 1937 and, at home in 1948, it gained registration in South Australia as a union with the state’s industrial commission. The federation was recognised again in 1976 under the Public Service Act of South Australia and became the Australian Nursing Federation (South Australian branch) in 1988 (with the “Royal” from 1955 dropped from its name). Another name change in 2010 was adding “and Midwifery”.
In a 2016 first for South Australia, a law firm was launched by the nurses union. Union Legal SA gave members access to high quality but affordable legal services. The branch reached a milestone in 2017 of 20,000 members – a 90% increase since 2009.
The Rosemary Bryant Foundation with established in 2018 to fund high-quality translatable research to be quickly adopted and embedded into practice. The organisation also incorporated the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Education Centre, a registered organisation offering training in aged care, nursing and other health related areas, in 2019. The centre was recognised as the South Australian training provider of the year.
