"A nursing crisis: Why foreign nurses are struggling to find a job in Aotearoa,"

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1News reporter Corazon Miller crunches the numbers to see why many international nurses say they can’t find work despite a health sector crying out for more labour...

Their family’s hopes, and the financial support they offered, propelled sisters Tiffany and Michelle Maningo, 26, down a well-travelled path towards what they thought was a secure nursing job overseas...

They’d also heard nursing workloads were less compared to the Philippines, where it’s not uncommon to be responsible for 20 to 60 patients at a time...

Clutching papers, and hope, they were among hundreds of internationally qualified nurses (IQNs) who queued for hours. They were told that without ready-to-work rights, it wasn’t worth their time...

Fair organiser and Healthdaq managing director Nathan Cox said two weeks on, recruiters were still working through applicants.  

They were, he said, “surprised” by the numbers of IQNs without New Zealand work rights, and that had made the hiring process more complex when few roles came with a job sponsor...

“Honestly, if we had known that this is how hard it would be, maybe we’d have changed our mind about coming to New Zealand,” Tiffany Maningo says...

New Zealand’s call for more workers has seen a notable spike over the last 18 months of new nurses who have registered to work here. 

The majority – 85% - of the 16,606 new nurses on the Nursing Council’s register in the year to June 2024 were from overseas. However, a large number of these may have just registered with the intent of coming but are yet to arrive...

Accent Health Recruitment founder Prudence Thomson questions why the CAP courses continued to take in foreign students despite knowing how tight the market is right now.  

And she questions why some who do have extensive experience still have to go through an in-country assessment process in the first place...

Those on the frontline say the remaining budgets are tight, and they don’t have the capacity to support all nurses from overseas when many of their senior staff are struggling with their own workloads...