About us

Critical Care Nursing is a vital need in Papua New Guinea as the country’s population is faced daily with communicable diseases and non-communicable disease that in one way or the other would need and require specialized critical care either in the intensive care unit, high dependency ward, Cardiothoracic ward, Cath lab or emergency department. Each of these specialized areas has highly advanced and skilled trained nurses and doctors that care for patients needing critical care.

Hence, critical care has been present within the country since the beginning of the health system. In the year 1972 Port Moresby General Hospital had a four bed intensive care unit under the management of expatriates. While in 1962 the Port Moresby School of nursing provided the post basic certificate course of Theatre nursing which also covered critical care subjects were ongoing; then the University of Papua New Guinea took over and gradually developed the curriculum into critical care advanced diploma, 1998 to 2002 and further progressed into a bachelors course, 2002 to 2010 to date. So far the University of Papua New Guinea has roughly graduated a thousand plus critical care nurses from all over the country. This course has also extended to our neighboring island nations such as the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Tuvalu and Kiribati.

The Papua New Guinea Critical Care Nursing Society journey was a talk in all symposiums throughout the years and never started.  It was then introduced in Oro Province, September 2018 then was drafted in for critique in 2019 September in Chimbu Province . In the year 2020 Papua New Guinea Critical Care Nurses Society was born. Papua New Guinea Critical Care Nurses Society is a great milestone for critical care nursing, because it embarked on the bigger picture as the umbrella of all other departmental nursing societies. It is now a recognized society with the help of our Australian counterparts, World Federation Critical Care Nursing and Australian College of Critical Care Nursing/Monarch University.