Aged care nurses in Tasmania: how many there really are

Most workforce planning in Tasmanian aged care starts with a vacancy rather than with the size of the pool that vacancy is drawn from. That order makes the job harder than it needs to be, because the pool turns out to be very small.

We maintain a file on all 70 residential aged care homes in Tasmania, with bed numbers, region, ownership and provider group for each. Running the legislated care minutes across those bed numbers gives a usable estimate of how many nurses the sector needs on its books. Here is what that produces and what it changes about hiring.

The whole sector runs on about 1,470 nurses

Tasmania has 70 residential aged care homes holding 5,239 beds between them. At the occupancy rate the sector has been running, that is close to 4,700 residents on any given day.

Each of those residents carries a legislated entitlement of 44 registered nurse care minutes per day, inside a total of 215 care minutes. Convert that into hours. Allow for leave, training and sick days. Account for how heavily part time aged care nursing is. The sector then needs roughly 1,005 registered nurses on its books. Applying the national ratio of enrolled nurses to registered nurses adds about 460 more. Total, around 1,470 nurses.

Sixty-four of the 70 homes are private. They hold 5,129 of the beds and about 1,440 of the nurses. The six public homes are small multi-purpose services attached to district hospitals and they account for 110 beds between them.

Figures are modelled from bed numbers and the legislated care minute standard rather than counted from payroll, so treat them as the right order of magnitude rather than an exact headcount. Two homes have no bed count recorded, which pulls the total down slightly.

Your competitor for a nurse is every other employer in the state

Tasmania employed 10,196 nurses and midwives across all settings in 2024. A little under one in seven of them works in residential aged care. The rest work in hospitals, community health, general practice, mental health, disability and education.

That number cuts two ways. It means the aged care pool is genuinely thin, so two homes in the same town chasing the same enrolled nurse are close to a zero-sum contest. It also means the far larger group of nurses who have never worked in aged care is the only real source of growth. Recruiting from inside the 1,470 moves a person from one Tasmanian home to another. Recruiting from the other 8,700 grows the sector. It is also why word of mouth outperforms job boards in a pool this size.

Leadership roles number in the dozens

Across all 70 homes, facility leadership comes to roughly 157 roles once you count one facility manager, director of nursing or care manager per site, plus clinical care coordinators at around one per 60 beds.

A statewide pool of that size behaves nothing like a general recruitment market. In any given month the number of Tasmanian aged care leadership roles genuinely open is likely to be a handful. The people qualified to fill them are known to each other and most will move once or twice in a decade rather than once or twice a year. That is why leadership hiring here runs on relationships and timing rather than on advertising reach.

A pool of 1,470 people is not a market you advertise into. It is a list you build, keep current and work patiently.

Most towns are too small to support a channel

Spread 1,470 nurses across the state and the distribution gets thin quickly. The largest single concentration is around Lindisfarne, where three homes and 374 beds support roughly 105 nurses. Devonport, New Town, Glenorchy and Norwood each sit in the 60 to 71 range. Burnie’s single large home supports about 50.

Below that, the numbers fall away fast. More than half of Tasmania’s towns with a residential aged care home support fewer than 25 nurses in that setting. Queenstown, Dover, Currie and Whitemark support fewer than five each.

• In a town with fewer than 25 aged care nurses, paid advertising has almost no audience to reach. Referral, reputation and word of mouth carry the hiring.
• In a town with one home, a resignation is not a vacancy in a local market. It is a vacancy that has to be filled from outside the town or from outside the sector.
• In the three largest concentrations, competitive pressure is real and local. Nurses there can change employer without changing their commute, which raises the value of everything that is not pay.

The pool is ageing faster than it is being replaced

Tasmanian nurses average 43.1 years of age, against a national average of 42.2. The gap is under a year, though in a pool of this size it matters, because retirement out of a group of 1,470 is not easily offset by graduate intake.

For a single home, the practical version of that statistic is a succession question. If three of your senior nurses are within five years of retiring, you are looking at a replacement task that the state pool cannot simply absorb on your behalf. It has to be planned in advance, usually by growing someone internally. The same arithmetic sits behind what happens when only one registered nurse knows your roster.

What to do with a number like this

• Size your plan to the pool, not to the vacancy. If your region holds 328 aged care nurses in total, a plan that assumes a steady flow of applicants is a plan built on a market that does not exist.
• Spend where there is depth and work relationships where there is not. Paid reach earns its keep in the Hobart and Launceston concentrations. Elsewhere it mostly proves that few people are looking.
• Treat nurses outside aged care as your real growth source. Hospital, community and returning nurses are the only large group available, so what you offer has to make sense to someone who has never worked a residential shift.
• Map your own succession before the state pool has to solve it for you. Leadership roles are counted in dozens statewide, so an external replacement is rarely quick.

The bottom line

Tasmanian aged care runs on a nursing workforce of roughly 1,470 people, concentrated in a handful of towns and thinning out fast beyond them. Knowing that number changes what a sensible hiring plan looks like, because it rules out the approaches that assume volume.

If you lead a facility: work from the size of the pool rather than the size of the vacancy. The homes that recruit well here tend to be the ones that keep a warm list rather than the ones that post more often.

If you are a nurse: a pool this small is leverage. You are one of roughly 1,470 people in Tasmania doing this work and in most towns there is no queue of replacements behind you.