Foreign nurses can apply for a range of visas, including some that allow for permanent residency and a path to citizenship. Photo The Straits Times

SYDNEY — Nurses from six countries – including Singapore - will have applications to work in Australia fast-tracked from April 2025 as part of a scheme that has been welcomed by health workers, who say it will help to address the country’s nursing shortage.

But nursing associations also urged the government to tackle longstanding issues that created the shortages in the first place.

The scheme, revealed by the government’s Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) on January 26, allows registered nurses with more than 1,800 practising hours since 2017 to gain speedy registration in Australia and potentially avoid having to take exams or other assessments.

The change will take effect by April for nurses from Singapore, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Spain and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario.

AHPRA said in a statement that the changes will reduce the application time for nurses from the six countries to one to six months, down from current processing times of nine to 12 months or longer.

The move was welcomed by nurses, who said there was an urgent need to relieve pressure on staff at Australian hospitals.

The government says the healthcare sector is expected to face a shortage of 71,000 nurses by 2035. Australia has struggled to provide and retain enough locally-trained nurses, even as the population ages and healthcare demands increase.

The NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association, which represents nurses in the most populous state of New South Wales, said a new cohort of nurses from countries such as Singapore and the UK would be “extremely welcome”.

“We would be very grateful that these nurses want to work with us,” the association’s head, O’Bray Smith, told The Straits Times. “We could learn from them and their different ways and policies. It would feel like a great addition to our workforce.”

The Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association, which represents nurses who work outside hospitals in workplaces such as aged care facilities, also welcomed the move.

The head of the body, Ken Griffin, told The Straits Times that the move would help to address “urgent shortages”.

“Overseas-trained nurses are an important part of the mix for the nursing and midwifery workforce,” he said.

Australia has become increasingly reliant on foreign nurses. In the year to Jun 30 2024, about 43 per cent – or 16,622 - of the country’s 38,816 newly registered nurses were from overseas. As of Jun 30 last year, Australia had 504,049 nurses.

Australia’s Health Minister, Mark Butler, said the move would cut the “red tape” that was holding back approvals for highly-qualified nurses from comparable overseas health sectors.

“Australian patients will ultimately benefit from these changes, since these highly educated nurses can start working and providing care to Australians sooner, without waiting needlessly on red tape,” he said on January 27.

Australian states and territories, which run hospitals, have occasionally offered incentives to foreign nurses, especially to work in remote areas. A recent scheme in Queensland, for instance, offered up to A$20,000 to healthcare workers such as nurses to work in regional areas, though the scheme concluded on February 1.

Experts say such incentives, along with efforts to recruit from overseas, have helped to fill gaps, but longer-term solutions will need to focus on retaining domestic and foreign nurses. This would require improving pay and easing workloads at hospitals as well as increasing the number of locally-trained nurses, for instance by making study options more flexible so that those with families can study part-time or online.

An expert on nursing administration, Dr Nicole Blay, from Western Sydney University, told The Straits Times she supported the move to fast-track foreign nurses but noted that other measures such as relieving workloads would be needed to improve the chances that they stay.

“Australia is losing early to mid- career nurses due to workload and culture, and many senior nurses work part-time,” she said.

“In the 1980s large numbers of nurses were recruited to help ease Australia’s nursing shortage, which it did – temporarily. Many returned to their home country.”

Foreign nurses can apply for a range of visas, including some that allow for permanent residency and a path to citizenship.

The president of the nursing representative body, Nurses’ Professional Association of Australia, Kara Thomas, told The Straits Times she supported the fast-tracking of foreign nurses, but described it as a “band-aid solution”.

“While international nurses are welcome, this move ignores the fundamental crisis and challenges, with the main issues being dangerous understaffing, workplace safety issues, inadequate pay and bureaucratic inefficiencies,” she said. “This is driving thousands of our Australian nurses from their dedicated profession.”

Smith, from the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association, said nurses train for at least three years and “have people’s lives in their hands”, adding that their working conditions and “their pay needs to reflect that skill”.

“I don’t want to turn people off coming here to work, but there is not enough money to cover health resources,” she said. THE STRAITS TIMES/ANN