Tasmania has the oldest nursing workforce in Australia

Tasmania has the oldest nursing workforce of any state in the country. Employed nurses and midwives here average 43.1 years, against a national average of 42.2 and an ACT average of 40.1. On a small workforce of about 10,200 employed nurses and midwives, that gap compounds quickly.

For aged care providers this is a planning input rather than a talking point. The nurses who hold your clinical knowledge, run your medication rounds and mentor your new starters are, on average, closer to retirement here than anywhere else in Australia.

The state comparison is stark

Department of Health workforce data compiled by the ANMF puts the state averages side by side.

Tasmania’s nursing workforce has grown, from 7,985 in 2015 to 10,980 in 2024 counting everyone in the workforce rather than only those employed. Growth of that kind is welcome. It does not by itself replace the specific clinical experience that walks out the door when a Clinical Care Coordinator of twenty years retires.

Rural rosters carry the oldest teams

The age profile climbs steadily the further a service sits from a capital city. Nationally, nurses in metropolitan areas average 41.4 years. In large rural towns that rises to 44.1, in medium rural towns to 45.6 and in small rural towns to 46.9.

Much of Tasmania outside Hobart and Launceston falls into exactly those rural classifications. A regional home may be running on a small group of long serving nurses whose average age sits well above the state figure, with no obvious internal successor for the senior clinical role.

Retirement is the one workforce event you can see coming years in advance, which makes it the least excusable one to be caught by.

Retirement is a scheduling problem before it is a hiring problem

Most providers treat a retirement as a vacancy that begins on the last day. The useful reframe is to treat it as a handover window that begins two years earlier, because what you are losing is knowledge rather than a headcount.

The knowledge in question is specific. Which resident’s family wants to be called first. Which GP answers after hours. Why the medication round is sequenced the way it is. None of that is in your clinical software. None of it transfers in a two week notice period.

We have written before about single points of failure, where one registered nurse holds the roster knowledge for an entire home. An ageing workforce turns that from a resilience risk into a dated one.

Flexible hours are a retention lever the law already supports

Employees aged 55 or older can request flexible working arrangements under the National Employment Standards once they have completed 12 months of continuous service. The request must be in writing. The employer must respond in writing within 21 days. Refusal is permitted only on reasonable business grounds.

Providers who wait to receive that request are working from the back foot. Offering the conversation first, well before a nurse starts thinking about leaving, is a cheaper retention move than replacing them. A nurse who wanted to drop from five shifts to three will often take the three rather than retire outright.

Reduced hours also change the shape of a roster in ways worth planning for, which our piece on the roster as a retention tool works through in more detail.

Night duty concentrates the risk

Night shift is where an ageing workforce shows up first. Overnight is often the least popular roster line, so it tends to be held by long serving staff who have arranged their lives around it. When one of those nurses reduces their hours or retires, a provider can lose half its night cover in a single resignation.

Night cover is also the hardest line to fill from outside, particularly in a regional home where the pool of local nurses willing to work overnight is genuinely small. Any succession plan that ignores who is covering nights is planning around the easiest part of the roster.

Knowledge transfer needs a mechanism

Intentions rarely survive a busy roster, so knowledge transfer needs a structure with a date attached. The providers who do this well tend to use a small number of practical mechanisms rather than a formal programme.

• Paired shifts, where the experienced nurse and their likely successor work the same line once a fortnight for a defined period.
• A written handover of the role itself, separate from clinical handover, covering contacts, recurring issues and anything the position holder learned the hard way.
• Delegated ownership of one area, such as wound management or medication audits, given to the successor while the experienced nurse is still there to check the work.
• A phased finish, where a retiring nurse moves to two days a week for six months rather than leaving on a single date.

What to do in the next twelve months

• Map the age profile of your clinical team. You cannot plan a succession you have never counted.
• Name a successor for each senior clinical role, then give that person supervised exposure to the work rather than a title.
• Document the knowledge that lives in one head, starting with escalation contacts, family preferences and anything unwritten about the medication round.
• Open the hours conversation with your experienced nurses before they raise it with you.
• Build an enrolled nurse pipeline from your own assistants in nursing, since an 18 month diploma started now produces a registered practitioner well inside your planning window.

The bottom line

An older workforce is a strength in aged care, where clinical judgement is built over years and residents value continuity. The risk is concentration rather than age itself. A home where the three most experienced nurses are all within a few years of retiring is carrying a workforce risk it can measure today.

If you are a facility leader, the next twelve months are the cheap window. Succession planning done early costs mentoring time. Done late it costs agency rates, vacancy weeks and the quality dip that follows a rushed handover.

If you are a nurse, an ageing workforce means senior clinical roles will open across Tasmania sooner than many people expect. Positioning yourself now, through a leadership qualification or supervised exposure to the coordinator role, is a reasonable bet.