Community Health Nurses Win Six Per Cent Pay Rise After Bargaining They Described as Humiliating

About 140 community and district nurses employed by Access Community Health have ratified a new two-year collective agreement, winning a six per cent pay increase after six months of bargaining that delegates described as one of the most demoralising experiences of their working lives.

The settlement, reached in April 2026, gives nurses a three per cent increase backdated to 29 March, with a further three per cent in March 2027. It also delivers new entitlements that the workforce had long sought, including a Professional Development and Recognition Programme with an attached allowance, long-service leave for those who have been with the company for seven years or more, and automatic yearly salary scale progression for enrolled and registered nurses.

That last point matters more than it might initially appear. Before this agreement, workers could progress only one step on the salary scale during the entire life of a collective agreement. Nurses who remained with Access for years would watch their pay fall further behind colleagues in publicly funded hospital settings — not because of different qualifications or different workloads, but because of the way the company structured progression.

Kaitiaki Nursing New Zealand reported that NZNO’s collective bargaining for the nurses began last October with an offer of three per cent — split as 1.5 per cent immediately and 1.5 per cent a year later — and nothing else. Delegates rejected it and spent the following six months pushing for something closer to what they believed they deserved.

Two delegates described the process in terms that will concern anyone who assumes New Zealand health employment relations are always conducted in a spirit of mutual respect. Rachael Webb said she could not understand having to fight for things that were standard across the sector. “Having eye rolls and being told I’m ‘boring’ — fighting for things that should just be given… It makes me angry,” she said.

Fellow delegate Hollie Ashmore used starker language. “It was blackening your soul, going in with this bargaining team,” she said. She also pointed out that the impact extended beyond the workers in the room. “It’s not just us they hurt, it’s the humans we look after.”

Access CEO Androulla Kotrotsos responded to the conduct concerns by saying it was “disappointing to hear that some participants may have felt disrespected, as that does not reflect our intentions.”

The nurses who work at Access are not a peripheral part of the health system. They provide in-home care to older people and people with disabilities or complex medical needs, often stepping in directly after a patient is discharged from hospital. Their work keeps people in their own homes and out of residential care or acute wards. They are, in every practical sense, doing work the hospital system depends on — and yet for years they have been paid significantly less than hospital-employed nurses doing equivalent work.

Research highlighted during the 2024 strike action found that community nurses at Access earned up to $18,000 less annually than nurses employed in public hospital settings, despite holding the same qualifications and carrying similar workloads. Webb said at the time that she and her colleagues had the same qualifications and experience and worked just as hard, and that they should be paid exactly the same.

The gap has since narrowed somewhat, but this settlement still leaves community nurses behind their hospital counterparts. The new PDRP allowance, which begins after twelve months, is expected to help close it, and the introduction of automatic annual progression means pay should not lag in the same way it did previously. But closing a disparity of that scale takes more than one agreement.

The broader context of this bargaining adds another dimension to the outcome. Access Community Health was purchased by Anchorage Capital Partners, an Australian private equity firm, from Green Cross Health in 2023 for $50 million. At the time of the sale the business was reporting a pre-tax profit of $5.6 million. The workforce generating that revenue includes the nurses who were offered a 1.5 per cent rise as a starting point after years of pay stagnation.

Private equity ownership of community health providers is not unique to New Zealand, but it creates a particular tension when the services involved are largely publicly funded through contracts with Te Whatu Ora and ACC. The money flowing into those contracts comes ultimately from the public, and the conditions under which front-line workers are employed have a direct bearing on the quality and continuity of care that elderly and disabled New Zealanders receive at home.

None of that structural tension was resolved by this settlement. What was resolved is that 140 nurses will be better paid from the end of March than they were before, that some long-standing entitlement gaps have finally been addressed, and that the next round of bargaining will begin with a workforce that knows exactly what to expect and intends to be ready for it.

Have you or a family member been supported by a community health nurse? Share your experience in the comments below.