Australian healthcare sector looks to Ireland to tackle staff shortages

The surge in interest from Australia comes at a bad time for the HSE, just as it is urgently ramping up recruitment campaigns in Ireland and abroad amid increased concern about staff shortages here.

The health system in Ireland already faces competition from private hospitals which have been known to offer lucrative sweeteners to persuade staff to jump ship, and now the Australians are getting in on the act.

Australia’s St John of God Health Care has been interviewing in England and Scotland for three weeks, and will begin on Saturday in Ireland.

The group’s lead on mental health strategy Colman O’Driscoll, originally from Mayfield in Cork, is hoping to add some Irish voices to his workplace this week.

He trained as a psychiatric nurse at St Patrick’s Hospital and Trinity College, Dublin, before moving to Sydney in 2003 with his now wife.

“We were two young Irish people who wanted an adventure, and Australia gave that to us, and wonderful career opportunities and a great lifestyle,” he said.

“And a capacity to grow, that I think from afar looking back on Ireland, we just wouldn’t have had in Ireland.” 

He said the scale of healthcare is different as the larger population means nurses can opt for different challenges in large cities or more remote regional towns. 

I was really blown away by the flexibility around rostering, but also by the capacity to advance your career.

“Within a couple of years of being here I had a role as a unit manager in a hospital, and not long after that, I was the director of a service and in other senior roles. Now I’m CEO for the mental health part of the St John of God business. I was appointed to that role when I was 42.” 

He said, from talking with friends who work in Irish hospitals, the system does not seem as open for younger people.

“I still feel Ireland is very much about ‘you have to put in your time’, and then when you’ve got a certain number of years done, you might get a chance to progress,” he said.

His colleague, group director of nursing and patient experience Dani Meinema said they encourage nurses to take on training or promotions.

“As an organisational value, it’s about valuing all of our caregivers, it doesn’t matter if you are a nurse, a cleaner, or a medical practitioner, we are all here delivering the care,” she said.

Basic salaries for registered nurses and midwives in New South Wales, Victoria, and Western Australia, where this group operates, range from $72,000 to $92,000 (€46,500 to €59,400).

Across the wider healthcare system in Australia, however, some other issues will be all too familiar to Irish nurses.

On September 1, thousands of angry nurses and midwives in Australia walked off the job for the third time this year. The NSW Nurses and Midwives Association said it was a “ fight for safe staffing ratios”.

The government in Victoria, the state behind the billboard campaign here, announced in August it will hire and train more than 17,000 nurses and midwives.

Victoria’s minister for health Mary-Anne Thomas said: “You can’t deliver a health system with empty hospitals, which is why we are investing in hardworking nurses and midwives that are helping Victorian patients every single day.” 

Also in August, Australian broadcaster ABC News reported on a teenager recovering from cancer who waited over 27 hours on a hospital hallway for a bed.

Pictures supplied by his mother look grimly familiar to Irish eyes.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows 260,000 nurses working in Australia last year, a jump of 19% since 2016.

“Census data shows over 40% of registered nurses and aged and disabled carers were born overseas, with almost 40,000 arriving since 2016,” said Australian statistician David Gruen.

“A 40% share born overseas is significantly higher than the average across all occupations of 32% born overseas.” 

Conversely, the latest Irish figures show large numbers of foreign staff arriving here. 

Between June 2021 and May this year, 4,937 new nurses started work here, 3,021 of whom were from outside the EU and 361 from EU countries.

Among them were 188 Australian nurses and 42 from New Zealand, figures from the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland show.

Most new nurses came from India, at 2,364, followed by 391 from the Philippines, 250 from the UK, and 132 from Zimbabwe.

There were 1,555 new Irish nurses, with about 1,800 expected this year, said the board.

Nursing has always been a mobile profession. Some observers say all this movement is simply the result of pent-up demand from the closed borders during the pandemic. Covid-19 is also driving pressures on hospitals and carers in ways never seen before, with words such as “unprecedented” attached to almost every new patient statistics update.

It is not a great time to be a patient on a waiting list or a hospital manager struggling to find staff, but it certainly seems for nurses and midwives, the world is waiting.