“How do you see the role of the Registered nurse change over the next ten years?”

The nursing profession has a long history of being undervalued and has faced many challenges in regards to professional status, wages and working conditions. These challenges have been fairly constant and all the while, nurses have been fighting to enhance nursing skills and roles, while also maintaining the core nursing values. This research aims to identify the future of the registered nurse and how this may be expected to change over the next ten years; in order to do this it will explore the past history of nursing, their working conditions, challenges and achievements. Following this brief historical overview , a detailed view of modern day nursing will be the key focus of the paper, with particular relation to the latest professional battle of the 2012 Enterprise bargaining agreement and the Australian government’s planned policies for Australian nurses and what this means for their future. Nursing began in the homes of families as an intuitive and untaught way of caring for sick family members, with the role being given to women based on their care experience and observation. Throughout the dark and middle ages (500 AD to 1400 AD) this ‘care’ later developed a religious aspect, and nursing became an expression of Christianity and seen as ‘acts of mercy’ (D’antonio 2007). This ‘care’ aspect of practice still exists strongly in modern nursing today. However, the nursing reputation took a turn for the worst during the renaissance period (1500 AD to 1850 AD) when nurses were considered ‘wayward’, and the role of nursing was given to women of low social and legal status and was used as an alternative to imprisonment, it was also seen that women that were financially poor and single whom had no family or hope of marriage became nurses(D’antonio 2007). In 1836 Pastor