“Disheartening and shameful” is how some nursing students are describing the latest job offer numbers for this year’s mid-year cohort.
For this year’s mid-year cohort, 45% have been offered hospital roles under the Advanced Choice of Employment (ACE) programme – which matches new nursing graduates with hospital roles – down from 55% last year.
Advocates say NZ is effectively training nurses for Australia, calling on the government to strengthen policy, to set a number of nurse graduates that should be hired each year and create a clear career pathway to help keep the homegrown workforce.
1News spoke to several nursing students this week who are struggling to find jobs after years of study and unpaid job placements.
After graduating from Hawke’s Bay’s EIT Panitahi Howe, Honey Puriri, and Jen Wright all had hopes of helping to fix the health workforce crisis.
Puriri said she wanted to work for and give back to the community which raised her.
“Because I whakapapa from here, and the people in this community are my whānau,” said the nursing graduate.
Howe said the career pathway after graduating had been disheartening.
“Just to study a degree is hard, just to study a Bachelor of Nursing is a lot harder I guess and then 1100 unpaid clinical hours, eight-week transition, five days a week and then yeah, no job at the end,” she said.
“I’ve always had a passion for health care. It’s been my dream to work in health care. I’ve had whānau who have been in hospitals and had been in hospitals my whole life. So I always knew one day that I wanted to be someone to help them and to serve my community and to help my people.”
Wright, who is her classmate, said she had applied for six jobs so far – with no luck.
“It’s been really tough, it’s almost like a grieving process, all the hard hours that are put into doing this degree. And it’s been my dream for so many years, and then kind of had the rug pulled out from under me,” said Wright.
“It kind of felt like I was left to flounder a bit, getting that rejection letter.”
According to the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, 722 nursing graduates have applied for jobs, and of those, about 323 jobs have been offered to supported-entry roles in hospitals.
‘Training a set of nurses for Australia’
The New Zealand Nurses Union is calling for the government to set a yearly minimum hire number to help keep locally trained nurses in the country.
“We’re training some really good, grounded nurses that are trained in understanding kawa whakaruruhau, that are trained in understanding cultural safety, that understand what it’s like working with Māori, engaging with Māori and other diverse populations,” said NZNO president Kerri Nuku.
“So we are training a great set of nurses for Australia.”
Nuku said patients are complaining because “they’ve not got the quality of care that they need to live to feel safe within hospitals”.
“One of those fundamental things is about employing nurses so that they can alleviate some of the strain, some of the de-escalate, some of the pressures that are happening in ED points and pressure points.
“But at the moment when you’ve got political drivers that are compromising the quality of care, the student nurses or the new graduates that can’t get jobs are a victim of that.”
Meanwhile, Health Minister Simeon Brown said Health New Zealand is committed to ensure it has the right number of nurses across the country.
“Well actually, retention rates have improved significantly in the last few years in 2022.”
“There was turnover rate of around 14% that’s down to 8% which means we are attracting and retaining nurses in Health NZ.”