Could life look different?
Why healthcare professionals move to Australia or New Zealand — and what they say they miss
You have seen the pitch: work-life balance, beaches, space. Much of it is true. This is the rest of the picture — what people gain, what they trade and what they miss — so you can decide whether the trade is right for you.
It shouldn’t start with a vacancy
But when you are thinking about moving your life — and possibly your family’s — to the other side of the world, there is more you probably want to know. What do the healthcare professionals who made the move love? What surprised them? And what do they miss, six months or ten years later?
Not to persuade you to go, and not to put you off. Deciding whether to move shouldn’t start with a vacancy. It should start with whether you can see a life there.
You don’t need to have decided anything yet — not the country, not the timing, not whether you are going at all. This is exploration. Every other part of the site is open without it, and this page is here whenever the question comes back.
Why people go
More life around the working day
Finishing a shift with daylight left. Weekends that are not spent recovering. Wanting work to take up a smaller share of life.
A different working life
Another health system, other ways of working, a specialist opening, or simply a change. Not easier by definition — different.
Children who grow up outside
Space, schooling, and wanting children to know another country while they are young enough for it to become theirs.
Earning potential
Real in some Australian professions and places. The headline salary is only part of it — Make the numbers work is where that gets tested.
Room to live
A garden. A shorter drive to work. Coast or hills as part of an ordinary week rather than a holiday. Not everyone gets a house by the beach.
Doing something extraordinary
Some people simply want to, while they can. Wonder about it for ten years and there comes a point where you either do it or accept you probably never will.
Tired of the one you are in
Some people are: the workload, the waits, the pay conversation, a service that runs on goodwill. A real reason. A move changes a great deal and does not fix what would travel with you — and both these systems are under pressure too. Different pressure, not none.
Someone you know has done it
A friend, a colleague, a cousin already there. Often the thing that turns an idea into something that feels possible.
Two countries, two different offers
Australia and New Zealand are not one place, and neither is one place inside itself.
Pace, nature, scale
Smaller communities, the outdoors close to ordinary life, and a different scale of living. People come for family life and adventure more than for earning potential.
Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Palmerston North and rural New Zealand are very different lives.
Explore New ZealandWarmth, size, opportunity
A warmer climate, larger cities, a bigger health system and job market, long-established migrant communities, and stronger earning potential in some professions.
Perth, Melbourne, Hobart, Bundaberg and regional Western Australia are not interchangeable.
Explore AustraliaWeighing the two at once? Australia or New Zealand? sets them side by side.
What people say they love
- The children being outside — after school, not just on holiday.
- The barbecue that isn’t saved for the one sunny Saturday in August.
- A walk after work, in daylight.
- A beach the tourists don’t know about.
- Room for a dog.
- Being known in a smaller community.
- In parts of Australia, how much of life happens outdoors.
- In New Zealand, how quickly you are out of the city and into coast, bush or hills.
- A shorter, calmer commute — for some people, in some places.
- The first Christmas on a beach. A child’s accent you weren’t expecting.
Eventually the extraordinary becomes ordinary. People tell us that is when somewhere starts to feel like home.
What is here is what the people we have placed tell us. Named stories appear as people agree to them — Megan’s, from Manchester to the Sunshine Coast, is the first.
The things nobody puts in the brochure
Written first for people leaving the UK, because that is who most of our candidates are today. Coming from South Africa, Ireland, India or the Philippines? What you would gain and miss is different, and we want to write it with people who have done it. Tell us what you would want here.
Food, and streets that change every few blocks
Chinese, Indian, Turkish, Caribbean or Vietnamese within a walk; the family-run place you have been going to for years. Both countries are multicultural, most of all in the big cities — a smaller city or regional town will feel the difference.
Terraces, stone walls, the pub
Victorian brick, villages where none of the houses line up, a pub that has been there for 300 years. And the pub itself — the local, the fire, the roast — is its own culture. Both countries have pubs; they are not that.
Another country two hours away
Lisbon for a long weekend, Paris by train, the Alps. Even if you rarely went, you could. From here the near world is the Pacific and Asia, and Britain is a day’s flying away.
The exhibition, the theatre, the tour
Melbourne and Sydney are major cultural cities and New Zealand has real arts and music scenes — but moving from a global city to a smaller centre is still a trade. If this is part of what makes you happy, it is not superficial.
A crisp October morning
The first cold day, autumn leaves, long light evenings. Christmas at 28 degrees delights some people and never feels right to others. New Zealand and southern Australia have real seasons; the tropical north does not. “Better weather” isn’t the question — what weather makes you happy is.
Knowing how things work
Which supermarket, which form, which queue. For the first while, nothing is instinctive, and that is tiring in a way people don’t expect. It passes; it is worth knowing it is coming.
How does being this far from home feel to you?
Food can be found and you can travel for a concert. Family is harder: you will not be there for everything.
Worth thinking through now rather than after:
- A full day in the air each way, and what the flights cost for a family.
- How much of your annual leave a visit home uses.
- Long-haul with small children.
- Ageing parents, and what an emergency would look like from there.
- Keeping relationships alive across a time difference that turns your evening into their morning.
- How often you could afford to go back.
Video calls help enormously. They are not the same as being there. For some people the life they gain makes the distance worthwhile; for others it eventually brings them home. Neither means the move failed.
The cost of visits belongs with everything else that has a number — Make the numbers work.
What matters most to you?
Pick as many as are true. It stays on this device.
Hold on to those. Find your place asks the same question about actual places, and the answers tend to point somewhere.
You don’t have to decide whether you are moving yet
The next question is simply which country might suit the life you are looking for.
Already know? New Zealand · Australia