A new impetus to ‘grown your own’ nurses rather than recruit overseas is the one silver lining of only 22 per cent of Queensland’s new graduate nurses finding jobs, says the state’s chief nurse Frances Hughes.
Hughes, the former New Zealand Ministry of Health chief nurse, said the Australian state was working hard to help new graduates to find work, particularly in rural and remote settings. However, it was an “incredibly complex process”, and at the same time, health services were cutting nursing staff.
Queensland has in recent years attracted high numbers of nurses from New Zealand and across Australia. Hughes said if there was any silver lining from the current situation, it was highlighting the ethical and moral responsibility to grow your own staff.
At the end of 2012, about 2700 new graduate nurses applied for public sector jobs through the state’s centralised application system – about 400 of those were graduates from outside Queensland. At mid-July, only 22 per cent of all applicants had been successful in being placed in just over 600 public sector jobs.
This compares to nearly 60 per cent of New Zealand’s 1209 nurses graduating in November 2012 gaining places in state sector jobs and 75 per cent (900) having nursing jobs by March. New Zealand mid-year graduates have so far been not so lucky with only 40 per cent of applicants getting programme places by early July.
Talking to Nursing Review in late July, Hughes said the Queensland new graduate unemployment was the result of a ‘perfect storm’ including a 'disconnect' between the education providers and service providers.
“We had a lot of national reports on the need for nurses in the future so there was a lot of incentivising for the universities to take on more students, which they did,” said Hughes.
But Queensland had a vacancy-driven mode of graduate employment so could only take on graduates where they had vacancies.
“On top of that we had huge expenditure issues and reform issues which meant the services have been cutting services and staff at the same time,” said Hughes.
She said it was focusing on where there were vacancies – which were largely rural and remote settings – and had initiated a government funding programme to support regional services take on than 100 graduate nurses in the middle of this year.
It was also funding some of the unemployed new graduates to go into midwifery training to boost the state’s midwifery workforce.
Hughes said Queensland does not have a new graduate programme system like New Zealand but nationally there was a lot of work being done on transition to practice and it also wanted more graduates to move into aged care and community settings.
Meanwhile, the Brisbane Times reported recently that Queensland Nurses Union members rallied outside the state’s parliament house in late July over a call by Brisbane’s Metro North Hospital for 140 voluntary redundancies from experienced nurses and midwives so it could employ 140 graduate nurses.
The hospital chief executive said 224 nurses had put up their hands for redundancy and health minister Lawrence Springborg said nurses who wanted to move on shouldn’t be denied the opportunity.
But Queensland Nurses Union secretary Beth Mohle said there were already hundreds of positions lost under the current government and “trying to dress these job cuts up” as a new graduate programme was “just absurd”.
