Nine national nursing and midwifery organisations have called for greater investment in multidisciplinary healthcare teams, saying funding and regulatory barriers are preventing professionals from using their full skills.

Australia’s nursing and midwifery peak bodies have released a joint blueprint calling for major changes to the way healthcare teams are funded, organised and led.

The Statement on multidisciplinary teams in healthcare comes as nearly 800,000 hospital admissions each year are linked to conditions that could potentially have been prevented through earlier care in the community, according to the organisations.

The groups say the need for reform is becoming more urgent as Australians live longer with increasingly complex and chronic health conditions, while the country continues to face critical workforce shortages.

The statement calls on governments to fund the time health professionals spend meeting, coordinating care and planning treatment together.

It also urges governments to establish clear clinical governance and safety standards, remove regulatory barriers that prevent nurses, midwives and advanced practice clinicians from working to their full scope, and give local communities greater control over the design of their health services.

The organisations are also calling for authorised health professionals involved in a person’s care to have access to the health information they need.

Australian College of Nursing chief executive Adjunct Professor Kathryn Zeitz said there was no single model of care that would suit every patient or community.

“For an older person managing several long-term conditions at home, the best person to coordinate their care might be a nurse practitioner,” Professor Zeitz said.

“For a woman going through pregnancy and birth, it might be her midwife. In a remote town, a registered nurse may be the only health professional for hundreds of kilometres.”

The statement says leadership of multidisciplinary teams should be based on the needs of the individual and the local context, rather than defaulting to professional hierarchies.

Australian College of Nurse Practitioners chief executive Geri Sumpter said funding should reflect the needs of patients and communities.

“We urgently need structural and, importantly, funding change to reflect this reality,” Ms Sumpter said.

“Funding should follow patient and community needs, not professional hierarchies.”

Nurses and midwives make up Australia’s largest and most widely distributed health workforce. Their work includes conducting health checks, managing chronic conditions, coordinating care after hospital discharge and helping patients use medicines safely.

However, the organisations say existing funding arrangements often do not support nurses and midwives to work to the full extent of their training and qualifications.

Nurse practitioners are excluded from MyMedicare incentive payments unless they are linked to, or work within, a general practitioner-led service. The groups say the arrangement creates an inequity for both patients and healthcare providers.

Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association chief executive Tanya Vogt said nurses played a central role in delivering coordinated care.

“Nursing work is critical to ensuring Australians’ health care is comprehensive and coordinated,” Ms Vogt said.

“Better funding this work means safe, high-quality care, delivered more efficiently, and better health outcomes.”

The statement follows a federal government review released two years ago, which found many health professionals were unable to use the full range of skills for which they had been trained and qualified.

The nine organisations endorsing the statement are the Australian College of Mental Health Nurses, the Australian College of Midwives, the Australian College of Nurse Practitioners, the Australian College of Nursing, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, the Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association, the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives, the Council of Deans of Nursing and Midwifery, and CRANAplus.