Hiring practice nurses: why the playbook for finding GPs doesn't work for nurses

By Sam Gillette, Founder of Taro

Most clinic owners run one recruitment playbook for every role: write the ad, post it, wait. That playbook struggles for GPs. For practice nurses it fails for entirely different reasons, and fixing it means understanding what those reasons are. The GP version of the playbook is covered in how to hire a GP in Australia.

Why is hiring a practice nurse different from hiring a GP?

Because the constraint is different: the GP pool is genuinely short, while the nurse pool is large but contested: every nurse in reach of your clinic is also in reach of a hospital paying penalty rates.

When a nurse vacancy drags on, the instinct is the same as with the GP vacancy: there just aren't enough of them. With nurses, that's usually the wrong diagnosis.

Nursing is one of the largest health professions in the country. The pool is not the problem. The problem is who else is fishing in it. Every nurse within reach of your clinic is also within reach of a hospital, an aged care facility, and often a community health service, and on headline pay, general practice usually loses that contest. Hospitals pay penalty rates for nights and weekends. A practice nurse role paid at award or just above it will rarely win a comparison that starts and ends with the pay line.

So an ad that leads with pay, or says nothing that distinguishes the role from a ward job, enters a bidding war you can't win. The clinics that hire nurses well don't try to. They compete on the things a hospital structurally cannot offer.

What can general practice offer a nurse that a hospital can't?

Four things a hospital structurally cannot match: predictable daytime hours, continuity with a known patient community, breadth of autonomous clinical work, and being treated as a clinician. They just don't appear in most ads, and they land hardest at particular life stages: school hours, winding down from shift work, staying clinical without the physical toll of ward rotations.

Predictable daytime hours. No night shifts, no weekend rotations, no being called in to cover. For a nurse who has spent years on a hospital roster, fixed Monday-to-Friday hours are not a perk. For some, they're the whole reason to move.

Continuity with a known community. Ward nursing is a stream of strangers. Practice nursing is the same patients across years: the diabetic patient whose numbers you've watched improve, the kids you've immunised since birth. Nurses who value that relationship side of the work can't get it in a hospital.

Breadth of clinical work. A good practice nurse role spans chronic disease management, immunisation, wound care, health assessments, and care planning. That's a wider clinical scope in a week than many hospital roles offer in a year, and it's autonomous work, not task-list work.

Being treated as a clinician. In a well-run practice, the nurse is part of the clinical team: consulted, trusted with their own patient load, backed when they flag a concern. Plenty of nurses have left roles where they were treated as a shift to fill. A practice that genuinely operates differently should say so, specifically.

These advantages land hardest at particular life stages: a nurse returning from parental leave who can't make hospital rosters work around school hours; a mid-career nurse worn down by shift work who wants her evenings back; a late-career nurse who wants to keep practising without the physical toll of ward rotations. Your realistic candidates cluster at these moments, so the pitch that works is not "join our team", it's "here is the working life this role actually offers."

How far will a practice nurse travel?

Doctors will relocate for the right role. Nurses, on the whole, won't, and they generally accept shorter commutes than doctors do. The life stages that make general practice attractive (school pickups, winding down shift work) are exactly the ones that make a long drive a dealbreaker.

The practical consequence: your realistic pool is the nurses who live within a comfortable drive of your clinic, and it's a fixed, knowable group. That makes knowing the pool matter more, not less. A GP search can widen its radius and find someone willing to move. A nurse search mostly can't. If the right nurse for your role exists, she probably already lives within twenty minutes of your front door, and she almost certainly hasn't seen your ad. How to size that pool is covered in the hiring radius guide.

How should you write a practice nurse ad?

Like a description of a working week (scope, exact hours, support, reporting line, and development) because that's what a nurse is actually weighing up. "Practice nurse wanted, immediate start" tells a nurse nothing except that you're desperate. The ad should cover:

• Scope. What will they actually do? Chronic disease clinics, immunisation, wound care, care plans, triage? If the honest answer is "mostly recalls and stocking rooms", fix the role before you advertise it.
• Hours. Exact days and times. "Flexible" means nothing; "Tuesday to Friday, 8:30 to 4:30, no weekends" means everything to the nurse arranging school pickup.
• Support. Who else is in the nursing team? Is there a second nurse, or are they alone? What happens when they're on leave?
• Reporting line. Who do they answer to: the practice manager, the principal GP? Nurses have been burned by ambiguous authority; clarity here is a signal that the practice runs well.
• Development. Is there support for upskilling: immunisation accreditation, chronic disease training, nurse clinics? A role with a trajectory beats a role that's the same in year five.

Every specific detail does two jobs: it attracts the nurse the role suits, and it filters out the mismatch you'd otherwise interview.

Where do practice nurses find out about roles?

Through people: word of mouth and local networks dominate this market, because nurses in stable roles aren't browsing listings: the ones open to a change hear about roles the way local professionals always have. Job boards, a weak channel for GP recruitment, are weaker still for nurses.

A nurse mentions to a friend that her practice is hiring. A GP mentions it to a colleague.

That is fine if your network happens to reach the right nurse at the right moment, and useless if it doesn't. The structural fix is the same one that works for GPs: don't wait to be found. Identify the nurses in your area and reach them directly, as a local practice with a specific role, not as a job ad. A direct, honest approach from a named clinic gets read. The same content on a job board gets scrolled past.

How fast do you need to move on an available nurse?

Within days if you can manage it, weeks at the outside. Because the local pool is small and every employer in it is short-staffed, a good practice nurse who becomes available does not stay available. She is absorbed by the hospital, the aged care facility, or the practice two suburbs over, often within weeks. If your process involves a fortnight of deliberation before first contact, you will keep arriving second.

Have the role defined before you need it. When the conversation starts, be able to name the hours, the scope, and the start date in the first exchange. Speed here isn't pushiness; it's respect for the fact that she has options.

How do you keep a practice nurse once you've hired one?

With the same specificity and respect that recruited her: real scope, protected hours, and a genuine seat in the clinical team. Replacing her costs far more than the recruitment did. A nurse who has been with the practice for years carries knowledge no handover document captures.

That knowledge (which patients need chasing, how each GP likes to work, where the recall system quietly breaks) walks out the door with her, and takes months to rebuild in someone new.

Practices that treat the nurse role as skilled clinical work rarely read this guide twice.

Where Taro fits

Taro builds the same clinic-owned recruitment system for practice nurses that it builds for GPs: it maps the nurses around your clinic and reaches them directly, under your practice's own name. You pay a one-time fee (half up front, half only when you make your first hire) and the system is yours for every hire after that.

FAQ

Keep reading