A leading health expert has backed the Government's new plan for recruiting new nurses, but said it doesn't address the key issue.
The move will add a further 830 clinical placements for nursing students, aimed at addressing shortages in the nursing workforce.
Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall announced the move yesterday, saying in this year's July and August intake there would be 130 more spots for nursing students starting their course. The aim is to train 700 more next year.
Auckland University's medical emeritus professor Des Gorman told Breakfast this morning the move was "a great idea" — to an extent.
"That's terrific, but it's not addressing the elephant in the room," he said. "The elephant in the room is how we keep nursing students in nursing schools and completing their degrees and more importantly, how we retain and extend our existing nursing population.
It comes as nurses are deciding on a historic pay equity offer after a long-running dispute. (Source: 1News)
"Our health workforce and our nursing workforce is like a colander.
"Trying to fill it up and keep it filled is only possible if you plug the holes."
Gorman said the first step is recognising the "excessive" workload nurses face at the moment.
Under the conditions, many feel they can't provide the care their patients deserve, he added.
"So we have to find ways of relieving some of their duties in the immediate term," he said.
"They tell us that they don't have flexibility in their work shifts, we need to provide them with flexibility, these are people with lives and families and they need to have flexibility in how they work.
"They tell us that they don't have enough autonomy in the way they work, it's all too structured.
"I guess the other thing we need to address is that the wage gap between Australia and New Zealand needs to be narrow enough that it's no longer a significant pull factor."
He said the issue of retention was affecting the whole health workforce.
"Yes, we can recruit and yes, we can train more, and these are all good ideas," he said.
"But right now our crisis requires a crisis response and that is, how do we retain and extend?"
'Professor Gorman's right' - health minister
The health minister said the Government is working on all fronts to recruit and retain nurses. (Source: Breakfast)
In response to Gorman's view, Verrall said it's a "complicated problem that's come on over many years".
But she agreed with his concerns around retention.
"Professor Gorman's right," Verrall told Breakfast. "We need to both be bringing new people in, domestically trained people — that will take some time, so we also need to grow our immigration.. and then we need to keep them in our system.
"We're working on all of those fronts."
Verrall pointed to a number of other recent government initiatives, including faster pathways to residency for migrant nurses as well as work on both increasing pay and addressing the gender pay gap.
"[But] I'm sure there's more to do," she added.
Asked about students leaving nursing school in their last year, Verrall acknowledged the drop-off.
"We want to work really closely with tertiary education providers to support students better, to make sure that they make the transition into work effectively," she said. "It's such a waste of training and talent that we have people dropping out at that stage.
"I also thought Professor Gorman's points about making sure that nurses and other health professionals feel supported in their work was a really good one," she added.
"There's a number of things that we have underway that we can scale up to support that."
SHARE ME