National leader Christopher Luxon has released new policy to pitch in up to $4500 a year towards the student loans of newly qualified nurses and midwives in return for bonding them to working in New Zealand for at least five years.

It is one of a range of measures National has released today to try to address worker shortages in the health sector. Others include allowing nurses to come on six-month visas to look for a job in cases where they do not have a job offer in hand and offering relocation grants to up to 1000 nurses coming from overseas.

Its policy would see the government pitch in up to $4500 a year for the first five years of the careers of nurses and midwives - a move National calculates would increase their take-home pay by $87 a week and make them $22,500 better off over those five years.

In return, nurses and midwives would have to sign a bonding agreement to commit to working in New Zealand for at least five years. It would also be open to nurses and midwives who had recently graduated in the past five years on a pro-rata basis. For example, a nurse who graduated three years before the policy came into effect would qualify for it for two years.

National has costed the policy at about $189.6 million over its first four years (about $47 million a year) which it says it would fund out of the savings it intends to make from cutting the contractors and consultants in the government sector.

Luxon said it would help the health sector retain early-career nurses and midwives at a time of high global competition for them.

“New Zealand’s health system is in crisis, with a severe shortage of nurses and midwives contributing to ballooning waitlists, delays accessing treatment, and dangerously overcrowded emergency departments.

“New Zealand does not train enough nurses or midwives to address this shortage, and the ones we do train are being aggressively recruited to move overseas.”

National is also proposing incentives to get more overseas nurses and midwives over, including allowing them to come on a six-month temporary visa without a job offer to look for work. They would also be able to bring immediate family members with them.

It will also set up a relocation support scheme, paying grants of up to $10,000 to cover the relocation costs of up to 1000 nurses and midwives from overseas - expected to cost $10 million a year.

“Nurses and midwives are at the frontline of our collapsing health system and are bearing the brunt of the shortage. Having to work long shifts without enough staff is driving stress, anxiety and burnout. Something needs to urgently change,” Luxon said.

It is difficult to tell how many nurses have left the workforce in the last five years, but the numbers appear to have increased. The figures obtained by National from Health Minister Ayesha Verrall include both nurses who have left the workforce and those who have simply changed jobs so have left an old job - those numbers show 2963 nurses quit a job in 2018, rising to 4752 in 2022 - a steep rise over the Covid-19 era.

On the latest Nursing Council statistics for the March 2023 quarter there were about 69,500 nurses with practising certificates - up about 6 per cent on the quarter before that.

Luxon said Labour had been too busy restructuring the health system to pay enough attention to the front line and had been too slow to put nurses on to the immigration straight-to-residency Green List category.

The Government added nurses and some other medical professions to that last December - well after it first came up with the category in May.

Health minister Ayesha Verrall has hit back at previous claims that Australia is a more attractive market both for New Zealand nurses and those from other countries, saying that after recent pay increases nurses in New Zealand earn a similar salary to those in Australia. They are now also on a similar immigration footing.