Kerri Nuku, Kaiwhakahaere
NZNO Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa
The unrelenting challenges from this coalition Government has been overwhelming. From the Regulatory Standards Bill, wider deregulation programme, repeal of the Smokefree Act, Treaty Principles Bill, assault on pay equity, patient safety strike to the changes to The Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act and now our next generation of homegrown nurses being told to haere rā – go overseas. These challenges will not stop without resistance. As a health workforce we must respond to health and social injustice.
We are seeing the heartache and the hōhā unfold among too many nursing graduates as they struggle to find work.
In the past month, I’ve seen graduates break out into tears, get angry and their whānau become numbed by talk that their daughter, son or mokopuna are being told to look for work overseas.
Our National Student Unit chair Bianca Grimmer hit the nail on the head when she said: “there’s just no workforce planning behind that”.
The lack of nursing leadership and policy coming out of Te Whatu and Ministry of Health is to blame.
There was a time when Te Whatu Ora would recruit about 90% of graduates but that’s not the case today. Te Whatu Ora’s latest figures tell us that they only managed to find work for 45% of graduates.
That’s not good enough when we all know there’s a nursing shortage across the entire health sector – from hospitals to primary health and aged care.
Te Whatu Ora cannot hide behind the acronyms of all its recruitment programmes anymore - ENSIP, SFYP. NEtP, NESP. It cannot give us the impression that graduates are not being “matched” with jobs because their preferences are too narrow.
Our NZNO nursing graduates are telling us that they are “looking wide.” Whitireia nursing graduate Shayna Tiatia is a classic example.
“I specifically went wide – primary health, district nursing, community health and surgical anywhere in the Wellington region – to make my chances better of getting a job match, but not even that worked. I still got a ‘no match’ response from Te Whatu Ora’s NEtP team.”
Despite us asking our country’s policy and nursing leaders for many years now, to develop a Māori nursing workforce plan, they have not. Such a plan is absolutely justified when Māori are the sickest people in this country, and evidence shows that Māori nurses play a huge role in reducing health inequities among Māori.
Next week, Te Poari is hosting our annual gathering of hundreds of Māori nurses, midwives and graduates. We will no doubt discuss recruitment and workforce issues. And their kōrero is likely to inform Te Poari and me about what we need to do next to look after our next generation of nurses.
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