EVENT POSTPONED
Workshop
‘For whose care? A Multidisciplinary Workshop on Overseas Educated Nurses in New Zealand’s Elderly Care Sector’
Wednesday 25 March 2020, 12-1pm
Room 1.21, Hunter Centre, 279-281 Great King Street, Dunedin
In New Zealand, one of the more popular pathways for overseas educated nurses to gain qualifications in New Zealand is to initially work in elderly care homes as care workers. While they help supplement the care workforce, there remains concerns about retaining those nurses with appropriate qualifications and competencies required by the New Zealand health system, especially in view of changes in public policy in health, education and migration.
The tasks of this workshop are two-fold: first, we examine and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of employing and retaining overseas-educated nurses with qualifications either or in both the home country and New Zealand, from the perspectives of both the nurses themselves and the elderly care homes, and against the background of the existing and changing public policies. Second, we attempt to explore strategies that would enable elderly care homes to meet its long-term needs for care workers, perhaps through encouraging foreign-educated, New Zealand-qualified nurses to stay (retention incentives and policies), and by adopting alternative recruitment schemes attracting the wider migrant worker population.
Through these exercises, we hope to provide some policy suggestions for both New Zealand and Japan in terms of how to sustain the intensifying demand for skilled care workforce by tapping the various categories of the migrant population and providing effective job retention incentives.
