After completing more than 1100 unpaid clinical hours across aged care, medical, surgical, mental health and community settings, I graduated in June 2025, passed the State exam, and became an RN in July.
You are now consulting on reducing these crucial undergraduate clinical hours and cutting the “clinical load sharing” hours for new graduate nurses from 240 to just 80.
This will lead to new nurses who are underprepared, overworked and at risk of burnout. It will also mean less competent nurses, which will ultimately compromise patient safety.
Imagine boarding a plane with a pilot who has only a fraction of the required flight hours — that’s what this feels like.
Compounding this issue is the ongoing hiring freeze. While the health-care system is suffering from staff shortages, newly graduated nurses are struggling to find jobs.
In late 2024, only about 50 per cent of new graduates were offered positions through the advanced choice of employment (ACE) programme.
Now, in 2025, fewer than 45 per cent have been successful.
Approximately 800 new graduate nurses are currently unemployed, despite a desperate need for more staff.
I am one of those 800.
Despite applying widely — including for health-care assistant roles — I remain unemployed.
Positions are scarce, with hundreds of applicants for each role.
You say there is no hiring freeze, but in reality opportunities are limited and ACE cannot absorb the backlog of graduates.
Meanwhile, your government has chosen to prioritise funding tobacco investments and private providers, and removing pay equity rather than hiring available nurses.
Now you propose hiring new graduates part-time, for as little as 0.6 full-time equivalent (FTE) hours.
On such hours, a nurse would earn about $874 per week before deductions, leaving just $662 take-home pay.
This is not a liveable wage for someone supporting a family, especially with student loans. Nurses would be forced into multiple jobs, unable to transition to full-time, and health-care employers would likely favour more part-time contracts to save costs.
I became a nurse because I care deeply about people.
Patients deserve safe, skilled, supported nurses — not staff stretched too thin by underfunding and poor policy.
You have the power to address this crisis: fund full-time positions, support new graduates into work, and value the nurses who are ready and willing to serve.
* The name of this letter writer has been withheld
by agreement with the Kaitiaki coeditors