Matua Raki - National Addiction Workforce Development

The current education and training environment shows various degrees of willingness to encompass addiction treatment curricula, and variable capacity and capability to focus on addiction treatment. To help strengthen and expand the addiction educational sector, Matua Raki leads the development of strong training and career pathways for the addiction sector at entry, graduate and post-graduate levels.

Matua Raki supports the National Addiction Training Provider Network to meet three times per year. Regular visits to addiction education providers by Matua Raki helps to communicate national developments and to identify opportunities for training developments.

Matua Raki  also collaborates with providers of related training to progress generic skills sharing and responsiveness of other key sectors, notably primary health, mental health, social and community workers. Matua Raki works collaboratively with other Workforce Development Centres/Programmes to identify areas for joint activities and communication. 

The leadership forums were orginally established by the Ministry of Health to bring together workforce leaders in the addiction sector from different functions: policy; planning; funding; training and education; service management and delivery; consumers and cultural leaders. Matua Raki staff now plan and host — in collaboration with NCAT — three leadership days a year (in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch) in coordination with the the Ministry of Health. The leadership forums bring together addiction workforce leaders from different functions: policy, planning, funding, training and education, service management and delivery, consumers and cultural leaders. This day provides an opportunity to include leaders from allied fields to share information and to develop collaborative activity at strategic and service delivery levels.

The project will lead and facilitate national recognition of advanced practice addiction nurses, and promote the implementation of advanced practice roles within mental health and addiction treatment services.

A key goal of the project is to develop national (and potentially Australasian) AOD/addiction nursing standards that include advanced practice competencies. Also essential to the project is the development of flexible post-graduate AOD/addiction advanced practice professional development nursing pathways — within clinical masters programmes — leading to the position of clinical Nurse Specialist/Nurse Practitioner. Such pathways require strategic and operational planning within the Mental Health and Addiction sectors to develop an infrastructure for the implementation and ongoing support of advanced AOD/addiction advanced practice nursing roles, including Nurse Practitioner.

The project will also strengthen national nursing leadership networks amongst nurses on the Nurse Practitioner pathway, strengthen strategic partnerships with nursing leaders within workforce programmes and assist individual nurses (as required) with achieving and/or recognition of advanced practice status.