The Pasifika Medical Association conference started last week in Rarotonga and finishes Monday Cook Islands time in Aitutaki. Photo: RNZ Pacific / Caleb Fotheringham
Pacific labour mobility schemes are being blamed for making it easier for nurses to leave their countries and take up employment opportunities as aged care workers in New Zealand and Australia.
Kiribati's health boss Benny Teuea said there is "a lost generation of doctors and nurses" being swept up by Australia's Labour Mobility scheme.
Nurses trained in the Pacific Islands cannot automatically work as fully-trained nurses in Australia and New Zealand, so many of them choose work in the aged care sector instead.
Teuea said nurses' skills are being wasted.
"We are grateful for the opportunities that are given to our nurses under the Pacific Labour scheme, but this has also been a struggle," Teuea told a crowd of about 600 healthcare workers at the Pasifika Medical Association conference in Rarotonga last week.
Pacific nations struggling to retain trained nurses
"For this year we have seen 50 of our nurses leave the country for greener pastures for opportunities in Australia.
"Most of them end up in aged care; their skills become useless; the training that they obtained becomes lost."
A depleting healthcare workforce is becoming a major problem for Pacific nations.
Cook Islands secretary of health Bob Williams said his country lost about 40 staff over the last year and "borrowed" nurses from Fiji to help fill vacant positions.
Williams said the Cook Islands was struggling with the lack of healthcare workers, along with other countries in the region.
"That's the struggle and challenge that all of us go through, especially post-covid," he said.
Fiji lost around 800 nurses last year and Tonga lost about 80.
University of Auckland's associate professor of public health Dr Collin Tukuitonga said nurses' training and skills should be recognised, and developed countries had an obligation to not devalue workers.
"It's really a form of exploitation," Tukuitonga said.
"If you take a fully qualified nurse from Kiribati to work in an Australian aged care facility, that's exploitation and it's clearly a problem around the region and a lot of island nations are suffering."
He said labour mobility schemes were a "double-edged sword" because there were still "clear benefits".
"Someone goes from the islands to New Zealand and Australia to work, they get money and they send it home to their families, they often use it to build a house - in other words there are positives in that exchange."
Deputy Director of General Science and Capability at the Pacific Community, Dr Paula Vivili, says there's no stopping the brain drain of health professionals from the Pacific Island to New Zealand and Australia. Photo: RNZ Pacific / Caleb Fotheringham
Put 'systems in place' - Valili
The Pacific Community's Science and Capability deputy director-general Dr Paula Vivili, said there was no stopping the brain drain of human resources to New Zealand and Australia.
He said nurses who leave the Pacific were losing their skills.
"Of course, the position of many countries, I would say all countries, is that they're not going to try to stop it, because people move for very valid reasons.
"But it's about ensuring that if people are leaving for New Zealand or Australia, that systems are in place within their countries to ensure that you still meet the needs."
Train family members
Pasifika Medical Association president Dr Kiki Maoate said the problem of healthcare workers leaving the region is not new and was happening prior to labour mobility schemes.
He wants to see everyday people being equipped with medical training to ease the burden on the healthcare system.
"Get the families to become health workers - why can't we do that, why can't we bring a process of education of health and all those sorts of things, and then allow the families to actually do the things that only we think we can do?"
Dr Maoate said family members can be trained to do tasks like removing stitches.
He said technology can also be utilised for tasks like online consultations to remove some of the strain on the workforce.
Pasifika Medical Association President, Dr Kiki Maoate speaks at the Pasifika Medical Association conference in Rarotonga. Photo: RNZ Pacific / Caleb Fotheringham