In October 2024, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation nationally celebrated its centenary.
To commemorate this significant anniversary, ANMF’s national office has produced a short documentary highlighting the federation’s past and present achievements. The documentary, titled 100 Years Strong, was launched on 23 October in Sydney, and online via a virtual premiere. Watch on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook.
A brief history
Australia’s first nursing association was formed in NSW in 1899. At the time, there was nothing to define nursing (nor, by association, midwifery) as a profession – including no uniformly accepted training standards and no certification. The Australian Trained Nurses Association’s aim, therefore, was to improve the status of nurses through registration and to develop standards of training in hospital schools of nursing.
Over the next couple of decades, it established branches in Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.
In our state a separate organisation had formed in 1901, with similar aims. For the next two decades the Royal Victorian Trained Nurses Association (RVTNA) operated, with great success, as a private training and registration body.
By the early 1920s, as state-based registration was legislated around the country, it had become clear that a federal body was in the best interests of nurses across Australia. So in October 1924 the Royal Victorian Trained Nurses Association merged with the Australian Trained Nurses Association to become the Australian Nursing Federation (ANF).
The RVTNA thus became the Victorian branch of the ANF (see note about our name below).
From little things, big things grow
From just 700 members in 1924, the ANMF is now Australia’s largest union, boasting a membership of more than 325,000 nurses, midwives and personal carers. More than 105,000 of those are Victorian.
Together with our members across the country, we have achieved extraordinary things over the past century in the name of protecting, promoting and progressing our members and their professional and industrial rights. Just some of the many significant accomplishments of the ANMF include:
- Establishing nursing and midwifery schools in the 1920s and later working to ensure a smooth transition from hospital-based training to university education during the 1970s and 80s.
- Lobbying for and supporting national registration and the establishment of the Australian Nursing Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia.
- Fighting for, and winning, ratios – in Victoria first – as well as penalty rates, allowances and entitlements, and better pay and conditions.
- Advocating for the recognition of, and expanded scopes of practice for, nurse practitioners.
- Securing fairer wages for aged care workers and better conditions in aged care facilities, including mandated care minutes.
- Advocating for, and winning, superannuation on paid and unpaid parental leave
- Promoting environmental sustainability in nursing, midwifery and healthcare more generally
- and much, much more.
