New Zealand’s medical and nursing workforce (2018–2025)
SPENCER JONES made this Official Information request to Ministry of Health
Currently waiting for a response from Ministry of Health, they must respond promptly and normally no later than (details and exceptions).
From: SPENCER JONES
To: Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand
Cc: Manatū Hauora (Ministry of Health), Medical Council of NZ, Nursing Council of NZ
Via: FYI.org.nz
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Official Information Act Request: Health Workforce Exits, Vacancies, Retirements, Illness-Related Leave, and System Capacity (2018–2025)
Tēnā koutou,
New Zealand’s health workforce has undergone unprecedented pressure between 2018 and 2025. Public reporting, professional surveys, patient experiences, and community-level conversations all point to significant workforce strain, early exits, unfilled vacancies, and increased difficulty accessing timely care.
To allow the New Zealand public to understand the true state of our health system, I request the following information under the Official Information Act 1982.
This request concerns doctors, nurses, midwives, and—where data exist—allied health.
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1. Annual workforce size (2018–2025)
For each year 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and the most recent data available for 2025:
1.1 Doctors
• Total number of doctors actively practising in NZ (holding a current APC).
• Breakdown by:
• Vocationally registered / General scope
• Public vs private
• NZ-trained vs internationally trained
1.2 Nurses
• Total number of actively practising:
• Registered Nurses
• Enrolled Nurses
• Nurse Practitioners
• Public vs private sector distribution
• NZ-trained vs internationally qualified nurses (IQNs)
1.3 Other regulated professions
• Total actively practising:
• Midwives
• Major allied health categories (physiotherapy, occupational therapy, radiography, mental health professionals)
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2. Workforce exits, attrition, and retirements (2018–2025)
For each year 2018–2025, please provide the number of practitioners who left the workforce, broken down (if recorded) into:
2.1 Doctors and nurses
• Retirements (with age bands, e.g. <50, 50–59, 60–64, 65+)
• Practising certificate not renewed / moved to non-practising / removed from register
• Permanent relocation overseas
• Resignations from Te Whatu Ora / former DHBs
• Resignations from primary/community care
• Early retirement or medical retirement
• Deaths (aggregated only – no identifying data)
2.2 Reasons for exit
If reason-for-exit coding exists, please provide the categories and counts for:
• Burnout
• Workload
• Pay / remuneration issues
• Workplace stress
• Health-related reasons
• Family/whānau reasons
• Other
If your system uses different categories, please supply those.
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3. Vacancy levels and shortages (2018–2025)
For Te Whatu Ora (and DHBs pre-2022), please provide:
3.1 Vacant FTE positions
For 30 June and 31 December of each year 2018–2025:
• Number of funded doctor FTE positions
• Number of vacant doctor FTE
• Number of funded nursing FTE positions
• Number of vacant nursing FTE
• Vacancy rate (%) for each profession
• Breakdown by region/district
• Breakdown by major service (ED, ICU, general medicine, theatre, maternity, mental health)
3.2 National shortage estimates
Any workforce modelling or workforce-plan documents estimating numerical shortfalls in:
• Doctors
• Nurses
• Midwives
• Allied health
for any year 2018–2025 (including projections out to 2030 if available).
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4. Illness-related leave, long-term sickness, and medical retirements (2020–2025)
Without identifying individuals, please provide aggregated data for each year 2020–2025 on:
• Rates of long-term sick leave (>20 days) for doctors and nurses
• Total hours or FTE lost due to sickness
• Number of medical retirements per year
• Any internal reporting on:
• Rising illness-related absences
• Patterns of unexpected or early medical retirements
• Occupational health risks
• Use of temporary/agency staff to cover sick leave
• Impacts on service delivery
If separate sickness records exist for:
• COVID-19-related illness
• Non-COVID illness
please provide both.
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5. Impacts of vaccination mandates (if analysed)
I am not requesting personal health information.
Only aggregated workforce-impact analysis.
For the period 2021–2023, please provide any internal analysis, reports, or datasets relating to:
• Total number of health workers stood down under vaccination orders
• Number who subsequently:
• Returned to work
• Resigned
• Retired
• Permanently exited the health workforce
• Any modelling, risk analysis, or workforce impact assessments performed in relation to mandates or their removal.
If no analysis was undertaken, please confirm this.
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6. Emergency department capacity and staffing strain (2018–2025)
Any national reports, dashboards, or numerical datasets on:
• ED staffing shortages
• Rosters below safe-staffing levels
• Instances where hospitals operated under “extreme staffing pressure” statuses
• Any CCDM (Care Capacity Demand Management) metrics indicating:
• Under-staffed shifts
• Failure to meet safe staffing targets
• Use of overtime/extra shifts to maintain minimum safety
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7. Briefings to Ministers (2020–2025)
Please provide:
• A list of all briefings, aide-memoire, or reports to Ministers of Health where the subject matter relates to:
• Workforce shortages
• Workforce exits
• System capacity or staffing strain
• Early retirement or illness trends
• Overseas migration of doctors or nurses
• And for up to the first five documents in each category:
• A copy of the briefing (with redactions if necessary)
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8. Format
• Please provide numerical data in spreadsheet or CSV where possible.
• Documents in PDF are fine.
• For any part you do not hold, please transfer it to the appropriate agency under section 14 of the OIA.
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Purpose of request (for context only)
New Zealand’s health workforce is under visible strain. Communities across Aotearoa are reporting:
• longer delays accessing GP and hospital care
• early retirements among clinicians
• increasing vacancies
• rising illness and burnout
• practices closing or reducing hours
• difficulty recruiting nurses, midwives, and allied health staff
This OIA request seeks neutral, factual, numerical data only, to allow the public to make informed assessments about the health system’s resilience, safety, and sustainability.
Kind regards,
Spencer Jones
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PUBLIC ANNOTATION – FYI.org.nz
Understanding this OIA: Why NZ needs transparent health-workforce data (2018–2025)
This Official Information Act request asks Te Whatu Ora, Manatū Hauora, the Medical Council, and the Nursing Council to release detailed national data about New Zealand’s medical and nursing workforce between 2018 and 2025. The purpose is to inform the public about the real pressures facing our health system — using official numbers rather than speculation or political spin.
Across New Zealand, many people are reporting the same experiences:
• longer waits for appointments,
• shrinking GP availability,
• hospital delays,
• ED overcrowding,
• services running below safe staffing levels,
• and exhausted clinicians leaving the profession or reducing hours.
These experiences closely mirror what is being discussed internationally, including widespread reports of early retirements, difficult working conditions, rising illness, and increasing migration of doctors and nurses to better-resourced countries. New Zealand is not isolated from global health-workforce competition.
However, national-level data describing the scale of exits, sickness, retirements, vacancies, or workforce shortages is fragmented across several agencies. Much of it is not easily accessible to the public.
This OIA aims to bring clarity by requesting eight major categories of information:
1. Total numbers of practising doctors, nurses, midwives, and allied health staff
Broken down by year, profession, workforce type, and training origin.
This shows whether NZ’s workforce is growing, shrinking, or stagnating.
2. Workforce exits and retirements
Including retirements by age band, departures overseas, non-renewal of practising certificates, resignations from Te Whatu Ora, and medical retirements.
This reveals whether early or unexpected exits are occurring.
3. Vacancies and FTE shortfalls
Annual vacancy levels across doctors, nurses, and midwives — by region and service.
This is essential to understanding how understaffing affects hospital capacity.
4. Rates of long-term sick leave and health-related workforce loss
Aggregated data on illness, absence, and medical incapacity among clinical staff.
This category acknowledges growing concerns about health-related attrition.
5. Effects of vaccination mandates (if the agencies collected such analysis)
The request does not seek personal medical information.
It simply asks for any existing workforce-impact assessments, recognising that mandates were a major operational factor between 2021–2022.
6. Emergency department safety metrics
Including CCDM data on under-staffing, missed safe-staffing thresholds, and capacity strain.
These metrics are directly related to patient safety and service quality.
7. Ministerial briefings
A list of all advice provided to Ministers relating to shortages or workforce retention.
This allows the public to see what the Government has been told internally.
8. Raw data (not commentary)
All requested information asks for numerical, factual, aggregated data only — not opinions or interpretations from agencies.
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✔ Why this OIA matters
New Zealand’s health-workforce challenges are one of the most important public-sector issues of the past decade.
Yet the public often receives only partial or delayed information.
This OIA is designed to establish a transparent, verifiable baseline of:
• how many clinicians New Zealand currently has,
• how many we have lost,
• how many positions remain unfilled,
• how illness and retirement patterns have changed, and
• whether national workforce planning is keeping pace with demand.
It does not try to predetermine the cause of these trends.
Instead, it seeks the primary data required for journalists, researchers, clinicians, and communities to draw their own evidence-based conclusions.
This is especially important in a period when many New Zealanders have experienced:
• sudden loss of family members,
• rapid onset health conditions,
• difficulty accessing care,
• and increased reports of staffing shortages within their local health services.
Public transparency is essential to understanding whether these lived experiences match official health-sector data.
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✔ What happens next
If Te Whatu Ora or Manatū Hauora hold the requested information, they must release it (or explain lawful grounds for refusal).
If they do not hold it, they are required to transfer the relevant parts to the correct agencies such as:
• the Medical Council
• the Nursing Council
• the Midwifery Council
• or other workforce bodies.
Once released, this data will give the public a much clearer picture of how well New Zealand’s health system is coping — and whether workforce capacity is improving or declining.
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