The number of Irish nurses holding a permanent Australian employer-sponsored visa has increased from 27 to 76 in the past two years. So what is the attraction, writes RONAN McGREEVY
SPECIALIST NURSES from Ireland are moving Down Under in greater numbers than before, according to Australia’s Department of Immigration.
Two years ago, almost 95 per cent of applicants for temporary visas were general nurses; now that has dropped to less than half, according to a department spokeswoman.
Surgical nurses are now the second most likely to emigrate under the scheme, closely followed by mental health nurses, emergency nurses, midwives and care for the elderly specialists.
Employers sponsor the nursing staff on a “Sub-class 457 primary visa” for up to four years and, according to the spokeswoman, this is the most common method of long-term employment for foreign nurses.
So far, 170 Irish nurses have applied for this visa, compared with 150 in 2009-2010.
Applicants for permanent visas are usually already working in Australia on temporary visas.
The number of Irish nurses holding a permanent employer-sponsored visa has increased from 27 to 76 in the past two years.
The number of nurses permanently sponsored by a state has increased from three to 11 since 2009, but the number applying independently dropped from 39 to 11, the spokeswoman says.
Statistics from the Australian Nursing Federation (ANF) show 62 per cent of all nurses work in public or private acute hospitals, just over 10 per cent work in care for the elderly, 9.5 per cent in a community setting, 4 per cent in mental healthcare, while the others work in outpatient clinics, education centres, military or industrial settings.
The ANF says there is an acute shortage of nurses in the care for the elderly sector. In a statement, federal secretary Lee Thomas says 20,000 new jobs are needed.
“The shortage of aged-care nursing staff is already having a real impact . . . nursing home residents are on average receiving just 22 minutes of care from a nurse each day,” Thomas says.
Admitting these nurses can be paid a weekly salary of between $168 (€122) and $390 (€284) less than public nurses, Thomas has appealed for state funding to close the gap.
However, the shortage may not just be about salaries, says Prof Christine Duffield, director of the Centre for Health Services Management in Sydney.
“There is a shortage of nurses in the aged care sector but it’s not a significant salary difference. It’s just not glitzy to work in that sector,” she says.
In a study of all nursing sectors undertaken by Duffield – Glueing it Together – nurses report an average working week of 30 hours. All the wards surveyed employ casual staff.
A quarter of the nurses said the quality of care on their last shift was excellent, just over half said it was good, while the remainder rated the care as fair or poor.
Having spoken at the National Council for the Professional Development of Nursing and Midwifery in Dublin, Duffield says the Australian system is not dissimilar to Ireland.
“I suspect it is more the lifestyle which is different. The system here [in Australia] is slightly more professional, and far more international in its outlook,” says Duffield.
“Cleaning beds and domestic cleaning are not nursing duties here.”
She says adapting is not challenging, but there are some differences, including Magnet hospitals – accredited through an American system for recruiting and maintaining quality nursing staff.
Describing Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Western Australia, Duffield says: “When you walk in there, it does feel different. I don’t know how sustainable that is.
“It’s hard to describe but you know when it’s a good hospital. There is a nice feel to it; professional and friendly, people know what they are doing there.”
According to Magnet programme manager at St Vincent’s Private Hospital in Sydney, Xantha Jones, “The bar is lifted on the delivery of patient care as nurses are required to review their practice and encouraged to provide evidence-based care to their patients.”
Jones, who emigrated from England in the late 1980s, says there are 88 criteria to the programme, giving nurses more autonomy in making decisions.
Duffield recommends nurses compare the state systems.
“There are good patient ratios in states which have mandated ratios like Victoria and New South Wales.
“In Western Australia, they are quite well staffed as well. And there’s lot of research going on there,” she says.
Further details on nursing visas available from immi.gov.au/skilled
Further details available from anf.org.au and nurseinfo.com.au
Nursing salaries in Ireland available from inmo.ie
‘I’m not getting the experience that I need to work in an acute setting. With the embargo, the opportunity to climb the ladder does not exist in Ireland’
There is no country right now that has the same allure for a generation of aspiring Irish emigrants than Australia.
The recession has afflicted the traditional destinations of Irish emigrants – the United States and the UK – to a significant, if not to quite the same, extent as in Ireland.
But Australia has managed to escape the worldwide recession for the most part, buoyed by a sensible fiscal policy and a rise in demand for commodities, especially from China.
The country is in the midst of a continuing boom, while western Europe is mired in an uncertain economic future.
Even in good times in Ireland, Australia was the destination of choice for enterprising young Irish people looking to travel and experience something different.
Now it has become something of a necessity. The public service embargo has had a devastating impact on health professionals who cannot get a job in Ireland, particularly nurses.
The ICE group in Galway has been recruiting Irish nurses for several years to fill gaps in the Australian health system.
Nearly 60 of them turned up for interviews last week in Dublin to work in the New South Wales health system where there is an immediate need to fill 200 vacancies.
For psychiatric nurse Amanda Cannon (23), who qualified this week from Athlone Institute of Technology, the choice was between getting irregular work with an agency or working in a nursing home.
She has secured employment in the Bloomfield Mental Hospital in Orange, Sydney.
Her reasons for going are both personal and professional. Her boyfriend Paul, a mechanic, went in June and loves it there. She also has two cousins in Australia who have nothing but good reports about the country.
The second reason is professional. “There are very few jobs here unless I register with an agency and get an odd shift there or work in a nursing home,” she says. “For my qualifications, this work experience in Australia can really benefit me. I will have experience that I can take back to Ireland with me. Hopefully, things will have improved and there will be better job opportunities available in Ireland.”
Like most Irish emigrants, she has mixed feelings about being so far away from family, but she believes that modern communications, such as Skype, make the distances involved much easier to contemplate.
Emma, a mental health nurse based in north Dublin, has an offer of a permanent position from the HSE on the table to be signed later this month, but has decided to emigrate to Australia.
The 24-year-old nurse, who did not want to give her name because she has not informed her employers yet, said the recruitment embargo made it difficult for somebody like her to expand her skills set. “It is not where you start out, but where you end up that is important,” she says.
“I’m not getting the experience that I need to work in an acute setting. With the embargo, the opportunity to climb the ladder does not exist in Ireland. Besides, there is no talk of a recession in Australia.”
She hopes to leave next spring and has admitted to a “heavy heart” as she does not know people in the country.
Michael Turley (34) and his girlfriend, Sinead Carroll (28), have also decided to go although they both have jobs in Ireland.
Michael works in Merlin Park Hospital with rheumotology and renal patients; Sinead works in the coronary care unit in University College Hospital Galway (UCHG). They both have job offers arising out of their interviews last week.
“For us it is a lifestyle choice, not an economic thing,” says Michael. “We’re lucky we’re going because we’re choosing to go. We’d still be going even if Ireland was still in the throes of the Celtic Tiger.”
The couple already spent a year in Australia in 2005 and loved it. They intend to apply for a four-year visa to live in Sydney and might contemplate staying in the country permanently. “We know the city and we already have friends over there. We’ll miss friends and family at home, but we’re not going to miss the weather.”
He says wage rates are comparable to Ireland and Sydney is an expensive city to live in, but there are ample opportunities to do overtime.
He described their previous experience of working part-time as nurses in Australia as “very agreeable” and they found the hospitals there to be well managed and friendly.
They also found that Australians had much the same outlook on life as Irish people and liked to work hard and play hard.
The New South Wales health system is likely to be recruiting further in Ireland in the coming year as it is looking to fill 1,000 nursing jobs next year.
