Today is International Nurses Day, celebrated around the world on 12 May, the anniversary of Florence Nightingale's birth. As we take time to recognise the compassion, kindness and dedication of our 500+ nurses, Amplar Home Health General Manager, Kylie Mayo, put pen to paper and shared how nursing has changed since she first graduated from nursing more than 40 years ago.
From Bedside to Broadband: 40 years in nursing and the future of care
Forty years ago, I began my career in nursing on the wards of a busy Sydney public hospital. Back then, nursing was defined almost entirely by what we did at the bedside. Our tools were hands-on, our training grounded in apprenticeship-style learning, and the word “technology” referred to the ECG machine in the corner.
Today, the core of nursing — compassionate, patient-centred care — remains unchanged. But almost everything around it has transformed. The role of the nurse is no longer confined to the bedside. Nurses now lead telehealth consultations, manage complex chronic conditions from afar, deploy sophisticated remote monitoring tools, and shape preventative health strategies that touch lives before illness strikes.
This isn’t a slow shift. It’s a revolution.
I am proud to lead a national home health organisation. At Amplar Health we have more than 500 nurses who every day, provide care across three essential fronts: face-to-face in homes and aged care facilities, virtually through telehealth platforms, and proactively via health coaching and preventative outreach. In every mode, they are innovating — often inventing — new ways of working.
A nurse today might start their morning in a patient’s home managing wound care, then lead a virtual wound clinic from a remote rural town, and later contribute to the design of an AI-enabled care triage system. We are no longer only responders to illness. We are educators, designers, researchers, navigators, and leaders of health.
Our nurses are trailblazing new career pathways in virtual care, digital triage, clinical informatics, and preventative health. Many have moved into hybrid roles that simply didn’t exist when I first donned my uniform. Others are becoming care designers — working side-by-side with engineers and software developers to ensure that the tools we use reflect the values and realities of clinical care. And crucially, we are doing all this while keeping care — genuine, human, and deeply personal — at the centre.
The health challenges facing Australia are significant: an ageing population, increasing chronic disease burden, mental health crises, and widening rural and remote health gaps. But the solution lies not just in new technologies or more beds. It lies in enabling our nursing workforce to work at the top of their scope, in flexible and creative ways, with the tools to reach people wherever they are.
In my four decades in this profession, I’ve never been more excited or more optimistic. Nursing is no longer simply a vocation. It’s a platform — for innovation, for leadership, and for shaping the future of care in this country. And it’s our nurses, from the city suburbs to the most remote outposts, who are building that future.