This move is about far more than your career.
Your family, your registration, the money, the people you’re leaving behind.
We didn’t start Ethicare because there was a gap in the market. We started it because people making this move deserved better than they were getting.
Finding the right role is one part of a successful move. It is everything around it that keeps people awake at night.
So we start there. We help you look at the whole picture before you commit to anything. Sometimes that means saying yes, this is right, let’s go. Sometimes it means saying not yet: wait a while, sort one thing out first.
Telling someone to wait almost never wins us the placement. It’s usually the right thing to say anyway. That, far more than any list of company values, is who we are.
Why I started Ethicare
I never set out to build a traditional recruitment company — I came to it from inside the NHS. Most of a decade in workforce transformation at one of the country’s largest teaching hospitals, and my own move to the other side of the world and back, taught me the same thing: this is about people staying, not gaps being filled. Ethicare grew from both.
Read my story
For years I worked inside the NHS, most recently as Senior Service Improvement/Transformation Manager at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. I led workforce improvement programmes there: reducing temporary staffing spend, the trust’s patient engagement strategy, waste reduction. It taught me how much depends on people staying, and how often that comes down to the human things no job description mentions.
I know what it’s like to pack up your life and start again somewhere new: a year travelling around Australia, then several years living in Wellington, where I met my partner.
What bothered me was watching international recruitment treat people like a gap on a rota. Someone gets sold a role, lands on the other side of the world, and the phone goes quiet exactly when the hard part begins. This isn’t a vacancy being filled. It’s a person, often a whole family, changing their life.
So I built Ethicare the way I wish someone had done it for me. We tell people the truth, even when it costs us the placement. We stay small on purpose, so you speak to the same people the whole way through. And we don’t disappear once you’ve landed, because that’s usually when you need us most.
If you’re weighing this up, I’d be glad to help you think it through.
Families matter as much as careers.
The move succeeds or struggles on whether the whole family settles, not just on whether the role works out.
From the other side of the world, to a place that becomes home.
Candidates deserve better than that.
Recruitment agencies traditionally share information only when there is a vacancy to fill.
You should be able to understand what you are getting into before anyone asks you to apply for a job.
So Ethicare does two things, and both of them are the business. We recruit into carefully chosen roles across Australia and New Zealand, and we get the people who take them, and the families who come with them, through registration, visas, arrival and the first year.
Our registration guides, comparison tools and relocation resources are free to use whether you find your role through Ethicare, apply directly to an employer, or work with another agency entirely.
Already found your job?
You don’t need to have been placed by Ethicare to use our relocation support. If you have secured a role directly with an employer or through another agency, Plan Ethicare is still yours to use: our free planning tool covering registration, the visa, the budget, schools, housing and what to do when.
Start planning your move
Healthcare first, recruitment second
Our background is NHS leadership: planning and reshaping the clinical workforce from the inside. That order matters. We think about staffing the way the people who run services do, as something that has to hold up over years rather than weeks.
Done well, this is workforce transformation, not vacancy filling. A clinician who arrives prepared and stays gives a service far more than one who covers a gap and leaves, so retention is what we design for.
How we support you when you apply through us
When you apply through us, one person supports you personally, at no cost to you.
We get to know you
Your goals, your family, and whether Australia or New Zealand is the right fit.
We help with registration
What your registration needs, and help getting the application right first time.
We find roles and prepare you
Locations, employers and pay talked through, then preparation for each interview.
We help you weigh the offer
We go through the offer with you, so the decision is yours and well informed.
We support the move
Help with the visa steps where we can, and the practical side of moving your life overseas.
We stay in touch after you arrive
Contact as you settle into your new life and career, long after the first day.
What you can count on: your agreement before we send your CV to any employer, clear next steps with an agreed time to check in, and a direct answer if we cannot help, so you can pursue other options.
What we can’t promise
Four things you will never hear us guarantee, and what we do instead.
Timelines that aren’t ours to give
Registration sits with your regulator and visas with the immigration authority. We give you the likely range and keep your file moving, but we will not quote a faster number to win you over.
A specific job in a specific suburb
Vacancies move. If your heart is set on one workplace in one city, we will tell you how long that wait could be, before you resign anything.
A supervisor waiting at the other end
Some registrations are granted subject to supervised practice, which only works if the department has a supervisor with capacity to take you. We ask before you accept and pass on exactly what we are told, but the answer belongs to the employer, and departments lose supervisors at short notice.
That the move is right for you
Some moves should not happen. If the scope, the pay maths or the family logistics do not stack up, we will say so plainly.
The part most agencies skip
The months after the plane lands decide whether the move lasts, so that is where most of our work happens.
When you arrive
We know your arrival date, and you have a mobile number a person answers. We call again once the admin lands all at once: tax number, bank account, a GP, school forms.
Once life settles down
A check-in a few months in, timed for the dip, because we know it is coming. It is the call people are most surprised to get. Not a survey, a conversation.
For the long term
We don’t set an end date. A contract question, a move to another region, work for your partner, a reference years later.
We’re a small team, not a concierge service. We won’t organise your weekends, and the settling in is still yours to do. What we promise: you’ll always know who to call, and they’ll already know your story.
Some questions a guide can’t answer
Once you have accepted a role, Sophie introduces you to a clinician who made the same move recently, matched on profession where we can and on household where that matters more. Some things you can only hear from someone who has already done it.
Community often matters more than salary.
The people who stay are the ones who found somewhere to belong. People rarely regret a move they prepared for. The regret comes from rushing it.
Where we are now
A small, specialist team doing a focused thing well, across Australia and New Zealand.
Ethicare in practicehealthcare professionals placed in New Zealand
medical imaging professionals supported
anaesthetic technicians recruited in six months
Clinicians from the UK & South Africa, placed across New Zealand & Australia
We measure ourselves on retention, not placements. The clinicians we have helped relocate have stayed, because the move was the right one and well supported.
We keep good company
Two practising senior clinicians advise Ethicare and have done from the start. Not a corporate board — their reputations are attached to ours, and both are minor shareholders, which we state plainly on the standard itself. The standard they hold us to is published: read the Ethicare Clinical Standard.
Professor Alastair Sutcliffe
Professor of Paediatrics at UCL and an honorary consultant at Great Ormond Street. He backs Ethicare because international recruitment, done ethically, strengthens patient care on both sides of the move.
Dr Jude A. Oben
Consultant hepatologist and physician at King’s College London. He backs Ethicare’s view that recruitment must serve patients and services as much as careers.
Let’s start with a conversation
Tell us where you have got to, and we will tell you what we would do next — whether or not that involves us.