The nursing workforce is more experienced, on average no older, but growing steadily according to the latest district health board workforce snapshot.
The March 2011 snapshot shows the full-time equivalent (FTE) nursing workforce has grown 10.5 per cent since March 2007, to 19,181 nursing jobs across the 20 district health boards.
The snapshot shows nurses continue to make up more than a third of the total DHB FTE workforce, which grew in total 7.7 per cent over the same time period while doctor positions grew more than 13 per cent.
The average age of a DHB-employed nurse, typically younger than the national workforce because of the number of new graduates in public hospitals, appears to have stayed static over the past four years at 43.9 years.
This makes the nursing workforce younger than the average DHB employee, which is 44.5 years, and younger than the average midwife (46.2) and substantially younger than the oldest workforces, which are male senior doctors (49.4) and female care and support workers (48.6).
But the DHB nursing workforce also has more than its fair share of senior and highly experienced staff shown by the average length of service having stretched from 8 years in 2007 to 8.6 years in 2011. Which makes nursing the longest serving DHB workforce after senior doctors (average 9.2 years).
The average nurse works 0.8 of an FTE position or 32 hours a week, which is the same as 2007 after rising slightly to 0.83 in March 2008.
The ethnic mix of the DHB nursing workforce is 60 per cent European, 13 per cent Asian, four per cent Ma¯ori, two per cent Pacific, one per cent Middle Eastern, Latin American or African and 20 per cent “other”.
Males made up 10.4 per cent of the DHB nursing workforce in 2011, which is less than recorded in 2007.
The proportion of nurses working part-time is highest in the Wairarapa, Taranaki, Nelson-Marlborough and Hawke’s Bay DHBs (average FTE 0.68 to 0.72), while the highest average hours per nurse were worked in the three DHBs in the Auckland region (average 0.83 to 0.84).
Auckland and Counties Manukau DHBs have the youngest overall workforces and the West Coast DHB the oldest.
The snapshot statistics were gathered by the District Health Boards’ Health Workforce Information team, which recently began publishing its quarterly snapshots reports again after a hiatus of nearly two years while it refined its data collection process.
