Wrong-footed move to cut grad nurses' hours and training

A proposal leaked to RNZ reveals Health NZ is planning to boost the employment of graduate nurses by hiring them for as few as three days a week, and by reducing on-the-job training. This could put both nurses and patients at risk.

The proposal is a welcome attempt to boost the numbers of graduate nurses employed, but raises concerns about support, safety and working conditions.

By the end of 2024, half of nursing graduates had missed out on a job offer, and many were thinking of heading overseas. In July 2025, Health NZ figures showed just 45 percent of mid-year graduates secured hospital jobs.

To fix this, Health NZ have committed to employing all new graduate nurses, though for the majority, if not all, this will mean part time work. New graduates are being employed at as little as 0.6 of a full-time role, giving them just three shifts or 24 hours work per week.

Simeon Brown has said new graduate nurses currently earn $75,773, but working such limited hours will provide an annual salary of $45,463. This isn’t much, considering many will have student loans to repay. Also, over a quarter of all new graduate nurses are parents, having entered nursing to provide a sustainable future for themselves and their whānau.

Being offered part-time work means nurses will need other jobs to make ends meet. Many will join the pool of relief nursing staff at local hospitals, providing cover for staff who are sick or on leave. As novice registered nurses, they might work one day on a surgical ward and the next on the stroke rehabilitation unit, each requiring particular sets of skills and medication knowledge. They’ll be working alongside nurses they don’t know, and without the necessary professional support.

Ensuring new graduates are employed in the health system makes economic sense and means we have a sustainable domestically grown workforce. But this needs a careful balance between experienced and junior nursing staff so that patients receive appropriate quality care, while new nurses learn and grow in confidence and competence. This week’s strike action by nurses is dominated by concerns of unsafe staffing.

Health New Zealand plans to dispense with the ‘Nursing Entry to Practice’ (NEtP) on-the-job training programme, which has been in place for 20 years. It plans to replace it with the ‘Supported First Year of Practice’ (SFYP) education and support ‘mechanism’.

Under the old programme, a new nurse would have a six-week (240-hour) orientation period, working alongside a senior nurse before taking on a patient load. Under the new scheme, this will be replaced with ten hours per week for 12 weeks of ‘clinical load-sharing’ with a more senior nurse.

New graduate nurses will be counted in the nursing allocation for their ward from their first day of practice. This may appear to improve nurse staffing numbers, but in reality, it will place more of a burden on both the new graduates and their nursing colleagues.

A hiring freeze on non-frontline roles in June 2024, has reduced the number of senior nurses in hospitals, including nurse educators who were central to delivering the Nursing Entry to Practice programme. This, together with the proposed reduction in study hours, will mean less training, education, and support for new nurses.

This reduction in new graduate support comes on top of the Government’s proposal to loosen health workforce regulation, which includes reducing nursing students’ clinical training hours.

It is well known that transitioning into practice safely and effectively typically takes a year. These first few weeks and months are often overwhelming for newly graduated nurses as they grapple with delivering complex care for patients with diverse needs, manage distressed (and at times aggressive) patients and relatives, learn the workings of the hospital and its multiple systems and policies, and get to know their peers, leaders and interdisciplinary team.

This can, and should, also be a time of positive personal and professional growth and satisfaction. Being a nurse should be deeply rewarding.

In many circumstances, the notion of flexibility and ideals behind the new ‘Supported First Year of Practice’ would be welcomed. But the current context is of a nursing sector that is understaffed, experiencing burnout, and suspicious of Health New Zealand’s direction and actions.

The risk is that this planned mechanism for employing and training new nursing graduates will only serve to meet Health New Zealand’s bottom-line of budget cuts, rather than keeping both new and experienced nurses, and their patients, safe.

The 75,000 strong nursing workforce is central to the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders. We need to find ways to ensure our new nurses are treated with the compassion, respect, and support they deserve, so they can thrive and flourish in our health system.