Nearly one in five overseas-trained nurses apply for the right to work across the Tasman within a year of registering in New Zealand, Nursing Council statistics reveal.
The recently registered nurses joined more than 2280 New Zealand nurses (4.6 per cent of active nurses) who applied to the Nursing Council last year for verification of their registration so they could work overseas.
Carolyn Reed, council chief executive, says applying for verification only shows an intention to travel. “Whether they travel or not, we don’t know”.
Of the 2281 nurses who sought verification, the vast majority (2102) had sought so under the Trans-Tasman Mutual Recognition (TTMR) agreement.
“So obviously the destination of choice is Australia,” said Reed.
She said the Council had sought some qualitative data on migration trends by sending out a questionnaire with verification documents over the last two years but “we don’t get a huge response”. Though it was aware that some nurses do get short-term contracts in Australia and cross backwards and forwards across the Tasman.
Another push by the Council to get better workforce trend data will see it shortly releasing the first phase of a longitudinal study into the cohort of New Zealand new graduate nurses and the cohort of internationally qualified nurses (IQNs) registered in 2005-2006.
“So not only are we getting the picture of a graduate nurses career, but we are able to compare and contrast how those two groups of people’s careers are similar or dissimilar, which is particularly helpful.”
Reed said to date the study only showed “slight differences” in trends between the two groups when it came to how many were still receiving a New Zealand annual practising certificate (APC) five years after registering.
But she had sought a breakdown in how many of the IQN nurses registered in New Zealand in 2011-12 had applied for their registration to be accepted across the Tasman under TTMR. This showed that 231 of the 1240 IQN nurses registered last year (18.6 per cent) had applied in the same year for verification to allow them to work in Australia.
The Council’s annual report shows that overall the active New Zealand nursing workforce grew by 829 nurses last year or 1.7 per cent to 49,356. This was the smallest increase for three years and down from a three per cent increase the previous year which had seen the active workforce grow by 1398 nurses.
The Council registered 2684 nurses in the 12 months to March 31 2012 (1240 IQN nurses and 1444 New Zealand-trained new graduates), which was a similar number to recent years. Nurses seeking verification rose from 1914 the previous year to 2281 in the 2011-2012 year.
Reed said she did not know why growth in the active workforce had slowed, but the some of it might be accounted for by the rise in verifications and possibly more nurses starting to retire.
Delays in overseas-trained nurses gaining places on competency assessment programmes (CAPs) through a lack of clinical placements on offer may also have reduced the potential number of new nurses registered.
“Overall, we don’t think its anything alarming, just one of the variances longitudinally.”
Meanwhile a major research report, the Nursing Council Report on Nursing Supply, is also soon to be finalised and presented to Council.
