New Zealand is facing a paradox: hospitals are crying out for nurses, yet newly qualified graduates are sending out dozens of applications without a single offer. Some are now packing their bags for Australia, following classmates who have already left.
Megan, a recent Bachelor of Nursing graduate from Auckland, completed hundreds of unpaid placement hours before finishing her degree late last year. Since graduating in March, she has applied for more than 100 nursing jobs across the country. Not one has worked out.
“I feel like I've failed, or there's something that I'm not showing in my application. I didn't realise it was going to be this hard to get a job,” she told Checkpoint.
Megan is currently surviving on the Jobseeker benefit while she keeps searching. If nothing comes through soon, she says she may be forced to give up on nursing entirely or head across the ditch.
“If I don't get a job, I'm either likely going to have to re-study something else, or go into a completely different workforce. The running joke at the moment is that I become a flight attendant, which I don't really want to, but I've got to get a job somewhere.”
How can hospitals claim to be understaffed while graduates struggle?
Megan says the disconnect between reported shortages and her own experience is hard to swallow. “We see constantly that the hospitals are understaffed and people are dying. Going into an election year, how can you promise us as nurses, new grads and even the public that the hospitals are going to be staffed?”
That anxiety is rippling through nursing programmes across the country. Eden Sandhu, a final-year student at Ara Institute of Canterbury, says watching the year above struggle has been draining.
“Like thinking that there's no guarantee of securing a graduate position is just draining. We're told that there's a shortage, but all of us still experience anxiety that people aren't getting jobs, will there be a position for me when I graduate?”
Sandhu has a family and a mortgage. She says the financial sacrifice required to become qualified, including hundreds of unpaid placement hours, is becoming impossible to justify.
“It's not okay to have graduates coming through having to consider after three years, to find something else.”
Paid placements and better pay could keep nurses in Aotearoa
Sandhu has been weighing up a move to Australia for months. She says New Zealand could change that calculation with a few bold moves.
“I think if New Zealand focused on supporting the students through placement, offering paid placements, upping the amount nurses are paid for the incredible stress levels they carry, and focusing on how to keep nurses here and not have such a terrible environment that people need to shoot off, that would change how I feel about leaving. I would want to stay, I do want to stay, but unfortunately [if I don't find a job] I can't.”
Dawn Blyth, co-leader of the Nurses Organisation's National Student Unit, is also in her final year. Some of her classmates have already applied to Australian graduate programmes.
“I graduate in November... we understand that jobs aren't guaranteed anywhere in any climate. But what is really hard to understand is how can we be saying that our country is so short of nurses... when there isn't the funds to put those nurses into jobs.”
What is Health New Zealand doing about graduate nurse employment?
Health New Zealand national chief nurse Nadine Gray told Checkpoint the organisation is offering a similar number of roles to last year, aiming to keep a mix of experienced and graduate nurses. She said Health NZ is supporting all graduate registered nurses into employment, though this might not happen immediately, and acknowledged it has never been able to employ every graduate.
To ease the bottleneck, Health NZ is helping employers recruit up to 400 graduate nurses, with up to $15,000 available for urban placements and $20,000 for rural ones.
For graduates like Megan, that support can't come soon enough. “I feel like I've failed, or there's something that I'm not showing in my application,” she said. “I didn't realise it was going to be this hard to get a job.”
Will New Zealand lose its next generation of nurses to Australia?
The question now is whether these incentives will be enough to keep newly qualified nurses in Aotearoa. With Australia offering clearer pathways and higher pay, the risk of losing an entire cohort is real.
For Sandhu, the choice is not about loyalty. It's about survival. “I do want to stay, but unfortunately [if I don't find a job] I can't.”