More than a quarter of New Zealand new grad nurses were working or intending to work overseas compared to just 12 per cent of Oz graduates, a snapshot Trans-Tasman survey has found.
More than a quarter of New Zealand new grad nurses were working or intending to work overseas compared to just 12 per cent of Oz graduates, a snapshot Trans-Tasman survey has found.
The different job hunting trends were revealed in the first published findings of the Graduate e-cohort Study, which has been surveying graduates from the University of Queensland and the three New Zealand university-based nursing schools since 2009.
The recent article, A glimpse of the future nursing workforce by lead researcher Associate Professor Annette Huntington and her team was published in the latest edition of the Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing. It looks at a sample of 60 New Zealand nurses and 51 Australian nurses who responded to the first survey of nurses graduating at the end of 2008 – a response rate of about 25 per cent.
All of the New Zealand survey respondents were employed as nurses compared to 92 per cent of the Australian respondents. 13 per cent (8) of the New Zealand nurses were working in Australia (four in Victoria, two in Western Australia, and one each in Queensland and South Australia) and a further 13 per cent were intending to work overseas in the next 12 months (five in Australia, two in Canada, and one in the UK).
In comparison, all of the Australian nurses were working in Australia and only two had left their graduating home state of Queensland to work in other states. But six (11 per cent) of the Australian graduates were intending to work in the United Kingdom or Ireland in the next 12 months.
All the New Zealand graduates and the majority of the working Australian graduates were in new graduate programmes, but only 6 per cent of the Australian graduates were in current postgraduate study compared to more than half of the New Zealand graduates.
Both samples were nearly all female, and the average age was 25 for New Zealand and 23.7 for Australia, but the median age of the cohort was younger at 21-22, which was also reflected in their personal status, with the majority being single (68.2%) and without dependents (84%)
The vast majority of the survey respondents both sides of the Tasman were working in acute care hospitals in metropolitan areas, with surgical/perioperative (17.8%) being the most prevalent specialty area.
Huntington said the ongoing Graduate e-cohort Study now had four years of data to be analysed. New Zealand graduate respondents were working across a wider range of specialty areas than their Australian counterparts including mental health, primary health, and public health nursing.
