Reframing the role, identity and standards for practice for registered nurses working in the specialty area of intellectual and developmental disability in Australia: The NDIS and beyond

Objective: To identify how existing specialty practice standards can inform the development of specialty practice standards for intellectual and developmental disability nurses.
Setting: As the National Disability Insurance Scheme is implemented across Australia, the role of the registered nurse in caring for people with intellectual and developmental disability will change dramatically. Access to widely available, specialty practice standards will be necessary for the development of this field of nursing. Method: A descriptive design was used to identify the characteristics of speciality nursing practice standards published in Australia. A web search for all Australian nursing organisations and/or associations was conducted between 1 st June and 30th August 2017 using Google and Google Scholar. Once finalised, the first author led preliminary categorisation of all the published standards into a table that was cross-checked and edited by the research team until agreement was reached on terminology and content.
Primary argument: Thirty-three of sixty-nine specialist nursing associations in Australia have publicly accessible specialty practice standards. The content of these standards can be categorised in six primary ways which reflect the categorical organisation of the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia practice standards. This suggests that “nursing” is a unifying identifier in the context of superficially disparate sub-specialty areas of practice. Therefore, existing nursing practice standards can be used to inform the development of new practice standards for specialist intellectual and developmental disability nurses. Conclusion: Newly developed specialty practice standards need to reflect the beliefs and values about nursing prescribed in the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia standards if intellectual and developmental disability specific practice standards are to be useful for developing this field of nursing.