Nurses deserve better

During the Covid-19 lockdown, New Zealand valued the essential workers who may have been low paid but didn’t mind because they were rewarded with the nation’s undying gratitude. Feel free to read that in a sarcastic voice.

They included teachers, supermarket workers and, of course, nurses, all of whom lived with extra stress and took serious risks on our behalf. Given the threat Covid posed in rest homes, that was especially true of agedcare nurses.

Teachers and nurses might be feeling a little less essential now that New Zealand emerges from the Covid fog and attempts to reestablish normality. A ‘‘green list’’ of essential occupations issued by

Immigration NZ shows why.

There is a group of occupations with a fast track to residency. These include engineering, construction and science jobs, along with a range of health roles, such as GPs, anaesthetists, psychiatrists, psychologists and surgeons. This lucky group can work in New Zealand from July and apply for residence as early as September.

Which is good, of course. We are surely in need of people to fill these and other roles. But nurses? You will find them in the second tier, along with midwives and some, but not all, teachers. They can also start in July, but must wait two years before they can apply for residency.

The division between doctors and nurses is especially striking. Both are in demand and both are vital to the smooth running of a stretched health system. As New Zealand has hundreds of unfilled vacancies for nurses, it’s hard to understand why migrant nurses should wait two years to apply for residency while they watch imported doctors and other specialists get fast-tracked.

The rationale is a little murky, even bizarre. Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi claims he was told by the aged-care sector and others about concerns that migrant nurses might leave for better-paid jobs once they got residency.

Aged care is often an entry point for migrant nurses, who are reportedly paid $20,000 to $30,000 less per year than their DHB equivalents.

However, there seem to be doubts about what the sector actually told Faafoi. Three providers have told RNZ that their advice was the exact opposite. They said they wanted nurses fasttracked. If the money is better in Australia and Canada, then at least New Zealand residency could be an incentive. Waiting two years before applying would be an obvious disincentive. As Radius Care boss Brien Cree said, putting nurses on the secondary list ‘‘is going against the feedback that was received from the sector’’.

This puts Faafoi in an awkward position. Hemight be required to expand on the advice he was given. Meanwhile, Health Minister Andrew Little told RNZ he was not aware that anyone in the health sector was consulted.

Treating nurses and midwives as second-class citizens has also been condemned as sexist. It is an inescapable fact that the fasttracked occupations are maledominated and those in the second tier are female-dominated. That’s an unfortunate look.

But it must be purely coincidental that the Immigration NZ green list appeared on Wednesday, just one day before International Nurses’ Day, which marks Florence Nightingale’s birthday.

Still, the timing gave even more weight to a campaign launched on the same day by the New Zealand Nurses Organisation Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa for nurses to be better resourced, better paid and increased in numbers. And, one hopes, reconsidered for fast-track residency.

There seem to be doubts about what the sector actually told Faafoi.