New Zealand

This report outlines and evaluates a pay-for-performance program designed to strengthen the role of primary health organizations to focus on population health and health inequality programs, and to address problems of service access and lack of coordination between providers. [adapted from introduction]

The aim of this study was to transform the Clinical Practice Guideline for Perinatal Mortality into an education workshop to develop quality standardised interactive education acceptable to participants for learning skills in collaborative interprofessional care. [adapted from abstract]

The authors undertook a survey of both resident and non-resident graduates of Pacific ethnicity from health professional undergraduate courses at the University of Otago in New Zealand to examine the retention of these graduates in Pacific communities and factors influencing their choices of destination. [from author]

The purpose of this study was to test whether or not the effects of a seven week rural undergraduate placement for medical students (which showed positive influence on student attitudes to rural health and their intention to practise in a rural settings) persisted into postgraduate years. [adapted from abstract]

This study aimed to evaluate perceived and assessed clinical capabilities of recent graduates of an outcomes-based integrated medical program and compare to benchmarks from traditional content-based or process-based programs. [from abstract]

This paper assesses what health workforce sustainability might mean for Australia and New Zealand, given the policy direction set out in the World Health Organization draft code on international recruitment of health workers. [from abstract]

This paper discusses a key finding arising from a qualitative research project which explored the provision of educational support to clinical teachers who were at least 100 kilometres distant from a university medical school. [from abstract]

This article reports on an initiative in a rural New Zealand community to meet the need for after hours care. First contact for patients is with a community nursing team operating from the local health centre, complemented by on-call advice from GPs and GP clinics twice daily at weekends. The article reports on the demand for after hours services generated by a geographically defined community in New Zealand. [from introduction]

Preparing nurse graduates for practice is challenging because of the diversity of skills expected of them. The objective of this study is to identify the attributes a rural community expect in new graduate nurses in order for them to provide quality care. [from abstract]

This paper examines health workforce and migration policies in New Zealand, with a special focus on the international recruitment of doctors and nurses. [from abstract]

This yearly profile is a summary of statistics about the nursing workforce in Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, UK and USA.

There have been reported shortages in both the regulated and unregulated workforce in New Zealand, in particular of medical practitioners, nurses in primary care, mental health professionals, allied and primary health professionals, Māori and Pacific practitioners, and support workers. There is also an ongoing issue of a maldistribution of workers between rural and urban locations. In the future, the constraints on labour supply in New Zealand will necessitate a much greater focus on growing the health workforce and improving the performance and productivity of the available workforce.