Sarah Carriere’s move from Tawa to British Columbia reads like a lifestyle story. In Stuff’s expat feature, the Wellington healthcare worker weighs better pay and Canada’s outdoors against being a long way from family. For employers, that trade-off is the real story. Once a New Zealand health worker is trained and mobile, home is no longer a reliable retention strategy.
The uncomfortable part is that this is not one person’s choice. It is a pattern, and New Zealand’s policy response has mostly been to replace departing workers rather than ask why they go.
Imported to fill gaps, then gone
The Nursing Council’s 2025 report on international nurse migration is the dataset nobody talks about. It found New Zealand had the second highest share of foreign-trained nurses in the OECD at 29.9%, almost three times the OECD average of 8.7%. Internationally qualified nurses made up 46.6% of practising certificate holders as of March 2025, up from 29% in 2019.
The kicker is where they go next. About half of those nurses had worked in the UK or Ireland before registering here, and over 90% of verification requests from New Zealand-registered nurses seeking to register in another country, mostly Australia, came from internationally qualified staff. New Zealand is not the destination. It is a stop on the route.
The front door is working
Credit where it is due. According to the OECD’s 2025 International Migration Outlook, the Accredited Employer Work Visa was overhauled in 2024-2025, with median wage thresholds removed and required work experience cut from three years to two. All registered nurse roles now sit on the Green List’s straight to residence pathway.
That flexibility delivered. Health NZ’s 2024 workforce plan showed nursing FTEs rising from 26,505 in 2023 to 29,400 in 2024, with estimated vacancies falling from 10.8% to 6.8%, an improvement it attributed to overseas nurses. Less bureaucracy at the border was the right call.
Nobody is guarding the back door
The problem is that easing entry does nothing about exits. A 2024 analysis in The Conversation noted New Zealand had no retention strategy comparable to Australia’s or the UK’s, and argued that “not maximising nursing investment makes little strategic sense”. It also flagged an absurdity: hundreds of registered international nurses struggled to find jobs while existing staff reported shifts with no back-filling.
The leakage has a long history. In 2022, RNZ reported mental health nurses weighing Australian roles paying three to four times New Zealand salaries, plus flights and accommodation. By April 2023, nearly 5,000 NZ-based nurses had registered to work in Australia, against fewer than 200 Australian nurses going the other way.
Canada is now part of the pull. Writing in The Globe and Mail in 2023, Canadian nursing academic Susan Duncan argued recruiting nations owe something to smaller systems: “We cannot simply take from other countries.” New Zealand could make the same case about its own staff, though it has spent years doing exactly that to India and the Philippines.
It isn’t just hospitals
In the year to March 2025, 47,734 migrants left for Australia, 86% of them New Zealand citizens. Tim Wright, then an associate director at recruiter Robert Walters, said in 2025 that losing senior staff strips out institutional knowledge, leaving “organisations starting to fork out more than what they should ideally need to”. The OECD found New Zealand citizen emigration to OECD countries rose 24% in 2023 to 18,000, with 75% heading to Australia.
In 2024, the EMA’s Alan McDonald described those leaving as “probably our most productive people”, trained and two or three years into their careers, and warned construction and infrastructure would hit problems quickly if big projects ran at once.
A faster treadmill is not a fix
Treasury’s 2024 immigration summary put it bluntly: reliance on migrant labour reflects underlying local conditions, including low wages and poor conditions, not simply migrant preference. Immigration is a valid tool. It is not a substitute for being a place trained people want to stay.
For employers, the lesson is practical. Budget for retention the way you budget for recruitment, because replacing a trained worker costs more than keeping one. For the government, the question heading into 2026 is whether health workforce policy keeps measuring success by arrivals, or starts counting departures too. Until it does, every nurse Wellington trains is a candidate for British Columbia.
Sources
- Stuff: The honest trade-offs of moving from Wellington to Canada (2026-11-15)
- The Conversation: In a global nursing shortage, NZ’s reliance on overseas-trained staff is not sustainable (2024-11-19)
- RNZ: NZ healthcare workers feel sidelined as govt seeks recruits (2022-08-02)
- RNZ: The nurses ditching NZ for a better life in Oz (2023-04-26)
- The Globe and Mail: When recruiting nurses internationally, Canada must be wary of crossing ethical lines (2023-03-24)
- RNZ: Employers forking out more for employees in ‘talent-short’ market (2025-11-10)
- The Post: NZ business faces losing young dreamers and skilled up-and-comers (2024-10-25)
- Treasury: Summary of Immigration, A fit for the future (2024-05)
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