12 May 2026
Our Plunket nurses – in fact, all nurses – are the heartbeat of the health system. They connect whānau to the health sector and health services to whānau. Yet the work of our nurses is not showy or public; its power is in quiet, intimate moments of connection that make the difference.
One māmā recently said something about her Plunket nurse which sums it up for me: "From our very first appointment, she made me feel seen and heard… I’ll always be grateful for her gentle guidance and the reassurance she gave me when I needed it most."
The theme of this year’s International Nurses Day is ‘Our nurses. Our future. Empowered nurses save lives’.
At Plunket we aim to build connection and trust with the whānau we serve. This is the vital first step as we walk alongside whānau on their parenting journey. The people who are empowered to build that trust every day are our nurses, alongside our kaiāwhina and community health workers. Their mahi is crucial because without that special connection, that aroha, we can’t empower whānau and tamariki to thrive.
With so many whānau struggling with the cost of living and associated health and wellbeing issues, nurses at the grassroots working in their communities are needed now more than ever.
The International Council of Nurses says, “trusted, person-centred primary care... can transform health systems and address our world’s biggest health challenges''.
We fully support this view and we are always looking at ways to further grow and develop our nursing workforce to improve health outcomes, particularly in areas of greatest need.
One example is our immunisation pilot programme. We share our government’s concern at low childhood immunisation rates and support their target to have 95 percent of tamariki fully immunised at two years old by 2030. We're making it easier for whānau to access immunisation in their communities by training our nurses as vaccinators and providing immunisation services at 24 Plunket clinics around Aotearoa New Zealand. This pilot programme, run in partnership with Health New Zealand, has delivered more than 10,000 vaccinations since it began just over a year ago.
Plunket nurses are seeing increasing numbers of whānau struggling with mental health issues. We’ve long provided successful perinatal mental health services in Canterbury and Dunedin and we were delighted to launch our new Online Perinatal Wellbeing Service in March, initially focused on supporting whānau in the Waikato region.
This is a free service supporting parents and caregivers who are experiencing mild to moderate distress, anxiety or depressive symptoms and who have children aged up to five years. We are piloting this service to test and refine a model that could support wider national delivery in the future.
As with all our mahi, we are committed to working alongside other health providers with a focus on improving outcomes for whānau.
Any conversation about the crucial role of nurses in our health system and “harnessing their power to improve health outcomes’’ as the International Council of Nurses recommends, cannot avoid the issue of pay. The ICN, representing the 30 million nurses worldwide, identifies fair compensation as a key action.
Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, amendments to the Equal Pay Act late last year meant pay equity claims for our nurses were discontinued. We are committed to continuing our lobbying for pay equity and pay parity for our health workforce.
We know that our nurses make all the difference in the world for whānau, every day and that is worth fighting for.
