making the move to Australia<\/a>, joining their course mates who have already left.<\/p>\nAfter finishing hundreds of unpaid placement hours in Auckland, Megan completed her Bachelor of Nursing late last year.<\/p>\n
In Aotearoa, new nurses have to apply for graduate positions, some do this through Te Whatu Ora’s application system called ACE.<\/p>\n
Others apply directly to private hospitals, community organisations and primary care.<\/p>\n
But since graduating in March, Megan has applied for more than 100 nursing jobs and hasn’t had any luck.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Megan told RNZ’s Checkpoint she’s getting by on the Jobseeker benefit while she continues to look for work.<\/p>\n
If she can’t find work soon, she’s eyeing up Australia and said she may be forced to give up on nursing entirely.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Megan said it doesn’t make sense how hard it is to find work because of reported shortages and staff burnout.<\/p>\n
“We see constantly that the hospitals are understaffed and people are dying.<\/p>\n
“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?”<\/p>\n
‘Just draining’<\/p>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/intravenous-medication-therapy-or-iv-medicine-bottle-fluid-d-3YIHBXGRJVGLDFF5HM6R66NPXE.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
An intravenous medication or IV medicine bottle fluid (file image). (Source: istock.com)<\/p>\n
Hearing stories of graduates not being able to get work has students worried too.<\/p>\n
Eden Sandhu is in her final year of studying nursing at Ara Institute of Canterbury.<\/p>\n
But seeing nurses the year above missing out on jobs has made her anxious.<\/p>\n
“Like thinking that there’s no guarantee of securing a graduate position is just draining.<\/p>\n
“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?”<\/p>\n
To get their degrees, nurses have to complete hundreds of hours of on-the-job training, which is not paid.<\/p>\n
Sandhu said she had sacrificed so much financially to become qualified and worried about the future.<\/p>\n
“[It’s] a huge a worry because I’ve got a family and a mortgage… it’s not OK to have graduates coming through having to consider after three years, to find something else.”<\/p>\n
Moving to Australia is something that’s been on Sandhu’s mind over the past few months.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“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,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I would want to stay, I do want to stay, but unfortunately [if I don’t find a job] I can’t.”<\/p>\n
Dawn Blyth, the Nurses Organisation’s National Student Unit co-leader, is also in her final year of study.<\/p>\n
People in her cohort have already applied to Australia’s graduate programmes.<\/p>\n
“I graduate in November… we understand that jobs aren’t guaranteed anywhere in any climate.<\/p>\n
“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?”<\/p>\n
Health New Zealand national chief nurse Nadine Gray said a similar number of roles as last year were being offered to keep a mix of experienced and graduate nurses.<\/p>\n
She said Health NZ was supporting all graduate registered nurses into employment, but this might not happen immediately, and it had never been able to employ every graduate nurse.<\/p>\n
Health NZ was supporting employers to recruit up to 400 graduate nurses with up to $15,000 available for urban and $20,000 for rural placements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nursing graduates who have applied for hundreds of jobs and have not found work say it’s devastating to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":574648,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1122,134,111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-574647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-employment","tag-health","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}