Improving our Registration and Workforce Data

The information that the Nursing Council collects when nurses register and renew their Annual Practising Certificate (APC) is one of the biggest sources of information about the nursing profession. It helps everyone understand the makeup of the nursing workforce, where in the country nurses are practising, and how many nurses work in particular practice areas and employment settings. It’s used by a whole range of people, organisations, and groups to help with workforce planning, employment negotiations, research, and more. You can see some of the ways we report this on the Workforce Statistics page of our website.

We’ve been collecting this data since the 1990s (and some of the core data even earlier than that) but in 2019 our governing legislation – the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003 – was amended to make this a formal requirement. We’ve also made reviewing our data collection part of our 2022 – 2024 Strategic Plan.

Over this year, we are going to be looking at the types of data we hold and how we can communicate it more effectively. This will involve a major review of the questions we ask in our workforce survey. But we’re also making some earlier changes to better reflect the modern nursing environment.

Gender and Ethnicity Data

We now require you to give an answer for the ethnicity and gender fields when you register and when you renew your APC; you can no longer leave these fields completely blank. If you have not already recorded these details, we strongly encourage you to login to your MyNC portal and update this information now.

We recognise that not everyone feels comfortable providing gender and ethnicity information, and so you can state that you would prefer not to answer each of these questions. However, we want to make sure that not answering is a conscious decision.

Workplace Settings

In the workforce questions we ask you to complete when you renew your APC, we ask about the type of place(s) in which you work. We’ve made a short update to some of the possible answers here, to reflect the new structures in our health system. These are:

• DHB (Acute) has been renamed Te Whatu Ora Clinical (Hospital)
• DHB (Community) has been renamed Te Whatu Ora Clinical (Community)
• DHB (Other) has been renamed Te Whatu Ora Non-Clinical/ Other
• The two primary health care and community service codes have been combined and renamed Primary Health Care/Community Service (non-Te Whatu Ora).

We have also changed some of the examples we give for other settings to help with clarity. For example, if you work for Te Aka Whai Ora we have made it clear that we would like you to treat that as a Government Agency for the purposes of the setting question.