One of my first reporting tasks for Nursing Review was photographing striking Christchurch nurses in early 2002 – I recall my toddler son waving at them from his buggy.
Looking back at those early editions, the news pages were full of nurses frustrated by understaffing, unfilled vacancies, and lack of nurse leadership, while the back pages were full of job ads – lots of them – not specific jobs but generic ads for ‘staff nurses’, ‘registered nurses’, or ‘nursing positions’. The country’s hospitals were desperate for nurses.
The theme continued for much of the next decade, while the tide of interest in nursing started to turn with the ‘fair pay’ deal of 2005. This was when the inaugural, government-subsidised nurse entry to practice (NETP) programmes were rolled out in mid-2006 and there were more hospitals wanting new graduates than new graduates keen to work for them.
This situation remained right through until the end of 2008, when the global financial crisis (GFC) brought the ‘perfect storm’. The recession saw turnover and vacancies fall as more nurses stuck to their jobs or returned to the workforce; nursing school enrolments surged, with many seeing nursing as a secure career, and district health board recruitment budgets got tighter and tighter.
The first hint that those bumper cohorts of nurses-in-the-making would face the toughest job market since the early 1990s was when Nursing Review reported in July 2010 that once sought-after mid-year graduates were now graduating without a job to go to. The trend – an international one, as New Zealand is far from alone – continued to worsen. Even though nurse leaders scrambled to find new NETP places, the graduating cohorts grew faster. The result has been too many frustrated new graduates having been told that a nursing shortage loomed but are now getting the message ‘yes, we will need you in the future – just not right now’.
So now an NZNO-led petition of 8,000 signatures has been presented to the Health Minister Tony Ryall, calling for 100 per cent of new graduate nurses to be found NETP places. The risk of losing too many disillusioned new graduates now is that, when the inevitable nurse shortage hits, they will be long gone. And the cycle will begin once again.
Fiona Cassie
