Rachel Stephen-Smith said free nursing degrees may not target the right space in the system

Rachel Stephen-Smith said authorities needed to ensure graduates came to work in a safe and positive environment.

She made the comments as Canberra Health Services officially received its three-year accreditation on Wednesday, after passing its assessment from the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards last month.

The result came after the hospital nearly failed to meet 33 core standards in 2018, some of which constituted "extreme risks" to patients. In the recent assessment the hospital met all of the 151 actions.

Earlier this week, the Victorian government announced it would pay for people to complete nursing and midwifery degrees. Ms Stephen-Smith said she would closely watch the Victorian initiative but she had concerns and said she did not believe it targeted the right space in the system.

"We need to recruit and retain staff now," she said.

"We're not seeing a shortage in the number of people who want to train as nurses, what we need to do is ensure that we're providing a safe and positive environment for those graduates to come and work in."

Ms Stephen-Smith said it was unclear what Victoria's initiative would actually significantly increase the number of people training to become a nurse but conceded the territory government may have to consider the imitative if other jurisdictions decided to pursue a similar measure.

"It may have an impact on disrupting where people go to undertake their nurse education and so we'll be watching that very closely, as I'm sure every other jurisdiction will," she said.

"And what will make a real difference is if other jurisdictions decide to go down this route as well, then we'll obviously need to look at what the impact of that is going to be."

Canberra nurses have recently aired concerns about the skills mix in the hospital as a number of senior nurses have left the service over recent years. Another survey has suggested one in eight staff have indicated they intend to leave in the next two years.

More than a dozen nurses and midwives have spoken to The Canberra Times in recent months, where they expressed concerns the standard of care had dropped to conditions facing the health system and that burnout had ravaged the system.

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Ms Stephen-Smith said the service would explore opportunities for people to continue professional development by providing scholarships for people to continue their education, as part of retention measures to keep senior staff.

She said they would also explore how staffing was organised so that people who worked in busy, high-stress areas would have an opportunity to move elsewhere temporarily.

But the Health Minister also hoped the results of the accreditation survey would help with this. She said the survey had shown an improvement in culture.

"I think there have been many changes but one of the big ones has been a real commitment to turning around the culture, to empowering our staff to speak up when they have concerns about safety issues and to address issues on the front line," Ms Stephen-Smith said.

"That's a really important result when we talk about recruitment and retention of staff. We know that people talk to each other, clinicians talk to each other around the country when they're considering where to go to, where to apply for jobs."

However, staff have also said cultural issues and bullying was still rife within the organisation. Ms Stephen-Smith said cultural change took time.

"We can't turn around culture overnight, it takes a long time to build trust in leadership and trust in the organisation and it doesn't take much to disrupt that journey of building trust but this is another positive sign that we're going in the right direction," she said.

Ms Stephen-Smith attributed much of the improvement to the establishment of Canberra Health Services, which was created following the horror 2018 result.

"That really prompted some significant thought and change right across the service and really it was one of the catalysts for the establishment of Canberra Health Services as a separate frontline health service to really focus on the quality and delivering exceptional health care to Canberrans," she said.

Despite the fact Canberra Health Services nearly failed its accreditation four years ago, Canberra Health Services chief executive Dave Peffer said he believed the organisation had an opportunity to become "nation-leading" and he felt that in some areas the hospital was already leading the nation.

He said the implementation of a new digital record keeping system, which is set to go live later this year would help to propel the territory forward on the national stage.

The implementation of the system will cause disruption over the coming months as all Canberra Health Services staff will need to be trained in the new system, which will happen during rostered hours. Mr Peffer said elective activity would be slowed in order to do this.

"Where we do have the option to look at our elective loads and perhaps apply the brake for a number of weeks, we will do that to ease the pressure on the workforce to make sure we're still running a very safe service," he said.

Private hospitals are expected to take on some of the elective surgery load in the coming months to help with this.

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