Workforce report 2022–23

We have just published our ninth report profiling Aotearoa New Zealand’s nursing workforce.

Our last publication was in January 2020, just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, we have seen unprecedented growth in our nursing workforce, predominantly driven by internationally qualified nurses seeking registration in New Zealand.

In the reported period, more than one third of actively practising nurses were internationally qualified, further increasing the ethnic diversity of the workforce. Our quarterly data snapshots, available on our website, indicate that the proportion of internationally qualified nurses with a current annual practising certificate is even higher now.

The numbers of Māori and Pacific practising nurses continue to grow, though the overall proportion of Māori and Pacific nurses continues to remain static. This points to the need for more work to support the growth of our domestic workforce to represent the population of Aotearoa New Zealand.

We hope this report is useful to support policy development, service design and service delivery to our communities, as well as research and workforce planning.

We thank all the nurses who took the time to complete our workforce survey when they renewed their annual practising certificate. This data is shared with the Ministry of Health for workforce planning purposes, and we rely on it for our workforce publications.

Read the new Workforce Report now

See all our workforce statistics