Auckland's three health boards are looking no further than their own backyards to tackle their share of the country's nursing and midwifery shortage.
A recently launched advertising campaign by Counties Manukau District Health Board is encouraging and paying for former nurses to come back to work.
Aneight-week course run by the Manukau Institute of Technology to get ex-nurses back to a registered level costs about $4500, a cost that has been identified as a barrier to many former nurses wanting to return.
Any nurse who completes it successfully has their fees paid for by the health board.
Waitemata and Auckland district health boards also encourage former nurses to return to work, using the health boards' own internal courses.
Their nurses are not charged for those courses, with about 20 a year coming through the Waitemata scheme and 10 each year from the Auckland scheme.
The programmes are required by the Nursing Council to ensure returning nurses meet registered nurse competencies. Counties Manukau District Health Board director of nursing Denise Kivell told the Herald yesterday that the cost of the course had been putting nurses off returning to work.
"But we are very keen to get the nurses back into registration. They just need a helping hand."
Last year six former nurses returned to the health board. This year a further 10 are expected to return, and Ms Kivell said that number was expected to rise.
Many nurses left the profession over the past decade when wages were substantially lower, she said.
But the better pay now offered, combined with the well-publicised workforce shortage, was creating a lot of interest from those nurses.
Counties Manukau board employed some 1500 registered nurses in its hospital arm. It had a registered nursing vacancy rate of about 9 per cent - similar to other major health boards, she said. Using agencies to fill those holes meant paying them between 10 and 15 per cent of a staff member's yearly salary.
The health board's scheme was costing far less than that, and was allowing nurses from the board's own district to come back and nurse the people and cultures they already knew well.
"This is big money, but we want to grow our own nurses. We want to have nurses from our community. And we've had some stars return, which has been great."
