The way foreign nurses are required to come to New Zealand in order to get assessed and registered is raising questions around the ethics and transparency of the process at a time when the job market is so tight.

While foreign nurse migration is not new, nor unique to New Zealand, the International Council of Nurses president Pamela Cipriano said what's more pronounced here is the lack of transparency around the gap between the nurses coming here to get registered — and their actual job prospects.

Cipriano said it's disappointing to see the 1News reports of nurses being drawn to New Zealand with the dream of a job, and a better life, only to find they don't exist.

"New Zealand has this convergence of all of the difficult issues surrounding shortage of nurses, shortage of experienced nurses, the issues of inadequate workforce planning, and then also now the difficult situation that internationally educated nurses find themselves in," she says.

"[The gap] that's really something that I would highly encourage be looked at by the Government in terms of that process of bringing people in because I think that's where the major disappointment comes."

Nursing Council Figures show in the year to June 2024 5,321 internationally qualified nurses arrived to sit a competency course and get New Zealand registered — which if you take the average price of $10,000 for the six week course, sees them collectively pay around $53 million into the New Zealand economy.

Accent Health Recruitment Prudence Thomson says there's been too many come through and that's tipped the balance to an unmanageable level. "We need more senior nurses to support them in the workplace, regardless of where they come form."

She's concerned that there doesn't seem to be an ability to put a limit on the numbers that are coming through.

"I feel very, very sad that they've made the financial and emotional commitment not knowing that there would be no job for them." she says. "I think the institutions that took the money from the nurses to do the competency assessment program were unethical."

1News approached all the individual CAP providers, some said they weren't recruiting from overseas, others were only taking those they'd offered jobs too, while others had not put any limits in place, but said they'd made it clear jobs were not guaranteed.

The Nursing Council says it would require legislative change to impose limits on the numbers coming through to be assessed. And the Ministry of Health says it's the nurses' choice to come.

But Council regulations make it compulsory for nurses who can't get directly registered to come here and be assessed — if successful the accreditation is only of use to them for working here.