Before I moved to London, I assumed finding a nursing job in the UK would work the same way it does in New Zealand – browse the listings, apply directly, interview, done. And technically, you can do it that way. But when you’re sitting in Christchurch trying to navigate the NMC registration process, figure out visa sponsorship, and find an employer willing to hire someone who isn’t actually registered yet, the idea of having someone handle the logistics for you starts to look very attractive.

That’s how I ended up using a nursing recruitment agency. Or rather, that’s how I ended up dealing with three of them before finding one that was actually worth the trouble. The experience taught me a lot – about what good agencies do, what bad ones get away with, and what every internationally trained nurse should know before signing anything. This is that advice.

What a Recruitment Agency Actually Does

At its best, a nursing recruitment agency acts as a bridge between you and UK employers. They match you with NHS trusts or private hospitals that are actively hiring internationally trained nurses. They help coordinate the practical side of your move – visa applications, sometimes accommodation, airport pickups, orientation programmes. Some offer support with the NMC registration process itself, connecting you with OSCE preparation courses or study materials. A good agency essentially project-manages the most overwhelming period of your professional life, and when it works well, it’s worth its weight in gold.

The business model varies. Some agencies are paid entirely by the employer, meaning the nurse pays nothing. Others charge the nurse directly for certain services, or operate on a hybrid model. This is the first place things can get murky, and I’ll come back to it.

How I Ended Up With Three

My experience wasn’t a case of carefully auditioning multiple agencies. It was messier than that. I initially signed up with an agency – I’ll call them Agency A – that had been recommended by a friend of a friend who’d moved to London a couple of years earlier. They were responsive at first, full of enthusiasm and promises, but communication dropped off sharply once I’d submitted my paperwork. Emails went unanswered for weeks. When I did get a reply, it was vague and non-committal. After two months of chasing, I quietly started looking elsewhere.

Agency B found me, which is itself a useful thing to know – agencies actively recruit nurses through social media, nursing forums, and word of mouth in countries they target. They were slicker and more organised than Agency A, and they moved quickly. But during the process, they tried to steer me toward a specific private hospital that I hadn’t expressed interest in, and when I asked about NHS placements instead, the enthusiasm cooled noticeably. I later learned they had an exclusive contract with that private facility and were essentially funnelling candidates toward it regardless of preference.

Agency C was the one that finally worked. They were upfront about which trusts they recruited for, transparent about what they would and wouldn’t cover financially, and consistent in their communication throughout the process. They weren’t perfect – there were still delays, still moments where I felt like a number in a pipeline – but they treated me like a professional making a significant life decision rather than a product to be placed.

The Genuine Pros

I want to be fair here, because despite my mixed experience, I do think the right agency can make an enormous difference. The practical coordination alone is valuable. When I was trying to gather NMC documents from New Zealand, sort out a Skilled Worker visa, find somewhere to live in a city I’d never been to, and prepare for two high-stakes exams, having someone who understood the process and could tell me what to do next was genuinely helpful. I would have figured it out alone eventually, but it would have taken longer and cost me more stress.

The employer connections are the other major benefit. NHS trusts that regularly hire international nurses often work with specific agencies, and those roles aren’t always advertised publicly. Agency C connected me with my current trust, and I’m not sure I would have found that position on my own. They also negotiated on my behalf around start dates and gave me a realistic picture of what the role would involve, which meant fewer surprises when I actually started on the ward.

For nurses who don’t have existing contacts in the UK – no friends who’ve already made the move, no professional network to lean on – an agency can fill that gap in a way that’s hard to replicate through solo research.

The Real Cons

The loss of control is the big one. When you work with an agency, you’re partly outsourcing your career decisions to people whose incentives don’t perfectly align with yours. They want to place you. You want to be placed well. Those aren’t always the same thing. Agency B’s attempt to push me toward a facility that suited their contract rather than my preferences was a clear example of this, and I’ve heard similar stories from other internationally trained nurses.

There’s also the opacity around money. Some agencies are completely transparent about their fee structures. Others are not. I’ve spoken to nurses who discovered after arriving in the UK that their agency had charged their employer a substantial placement fee, which in some cases affected the trust’s willingness to invest in their orientation or professional development. I’ve heard of others who were charged directly for services – accommodation, OSCE courses, document processing – that they could have arranged independently for less.

And then there’s the dependency problem. When an agency is managing your visa sponsorship, your accommodation, and your employment, you can end up feeling beholden to them in ways that limit your ability to advocate for yourself. If something isn’t right – if the placement isn’t what was promised, if the accommodation is substandard, if you want to change trusts – extracting yourself from an agency arrangement can be complicated, especially in your first year when your visa may be tied to a specific employer. I’ve met nurses who stayed in situations they were unhappy with for months because they didn’t feel they had the freedom to push back. That’s not a position anyone should be in.

The Red Flags I Learned the Hard Way

Over three agencies and a lot of conversations with other nurses who’ve been through the process, I’ve compiled a mental list of warning signs. If an agency asks you to pay a large upfront fee before they’ve done anything concrete, be cautious. Legitimate agencies that charge nurses typically do so for specific, itemised services, not vague lump sums. If they’re reluctant to put you in direct contact with the employer before you commit, ask yourself why. If they pressure you to sign quickly or tell you an opportunity will disappear if you don’t decide immediately, slow down – good positions don’t evaporate overnight, and urgency is a common pressure tactic. If they can’t clearly explain your visa arrangement and who your sponsor will be, that’s a serious concern.

And perhaps most importantly – if they discourage you from speaking to other nurses who’ve used their services, treat that as a significant red flag. A confident agency should be happy for you to hear from people they’ve placed. If they’re not, there’s usually a reason.

What I’d Recommend

I wouldn’t tell any Kiwi nurse to avoid agencies altogether. For most internationally trained nurses, the logistical support is valuable enough to justify the trade-offs, especially if you’re making the move without a strong existing network in the UK. But I would tell you to approach the process with your eyes open and your boundaries clear.

Talk to more than one agency before committing. Ask specific questions about their fee structure, their employer relationships, and what happens if you’re unhappy with your placement. Search for them online – check reviews, look for complaints, see if they’re registered with the relevant regulatory bodies. The Recruitment and Employment Confederation in the UK maintains a list of accredited agencies, and sticking to those is a sensible starting point.

Most of all, remember that you’re the one with the qualification they need. The global nursing shortage means that experienced, registered nurses from countries like New Zealand are in genuine demand in the UK. A good agency knows this and treats you accordingly. A bad one hopes you don’t realise it.

I got lucky with Agency C, but luck shouldn’t be the determining factor in something this important. Do your homework, trust your instincts, and don’t let anyone rush you into a decision that shapes the next years of your professional life. You’ve already proven you can navigate the NMC registration process. Choosing the right agency – or choosing to go it alone – is just one more thing you’re more than capable of figuring out.

I first met Charlotte in a queue. It was a grey Tuesday morning at a testing centre in London, and we were both waiting to sit our OSCE – the practical exam every internationally trained nurse has to pass before the NMC will let you anywhere near a patient. She was from Auckland, I was from Christchurch, and within about ninety seconds we’d established that we knew some of the same people, had trained at overlapping times, and shared an almost identical level of anxiety about what was about to happen inside that exam room. We’ve been close friends ever since.

Charlotte and I took quite different paths once we got our NMC PINs. I went into acute medicine. She went into oncology – specifically, a specialist role at one of London’s major cancer centres. It’s a field I have enormous respect for but have never worked in myself, and over the years I’ve watched Charlotte grow into it in ways that have genuinely changed how I think about nursing. I asked her if I could write about her experience for this blog, and she said yes, on the condition that I didn’t make her sound heroic. She says she’s just doing her job. I disagree, but I’ll try to honour the request.

Why Oncology?

Charlotte didn’t come to London planning to specialise in cancer care. Back in Auckland, she’d worked in general surgical nursing at Middlemore Hospital – a busy, high-acuity environment that gave her strong foundational skills but left her wanting something with more continuity of care. In surgical nursing, she told me, you meet patients at their most acute, you help them through recovery, and then they leave. You rarely find out what happens next.

When she started applying for NHS roles, an agency put her forward for a position at a cancer centre she hadn’t initially considered. She went to the interview mostly for practice and came out having accepted the job. Something about the way the team talked about their patients – not as cases or diagnoses, but as people on a long and often difficult journey – resonated with her deeply. She said it felt like the version of nursing she’d always wanted to do but hadn’t known existed in that form.

The Learning Curve

Charlotte is honest about how steep the first year was. Oncology nursing requires a specialist knowledge base that goes well beyond what general training covers. She had to learn complex chemotherapy regimens – not just what drugs were being administered, but how they interacted, what the expected and unexpected side effects were, and how to manage acute reactions when they occurred. She had to become fluent in a vocabulary of staging, grading, and treatment protocols that was largely new to her. She studied for additional certifications, including the UK’s Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy qualification, which she describes as one of the hardest things she’s ever done professionally.

But the clinical knowledge, she says, was actually the more straightforward part. What she found harder was learning to sit with uncertainty and grief on a daily basis. In surgical nursing, the trajectory is usually clear – a patient comes in unwell, has a procedure, and gets better. In oncology, the trajectory is often ambiguous. Some patients respond beautifully to treatment. Others don’t. Some arrive with curable cancers and leave in remission. Others arrive knowing that treatment is about buying time, not beating the disease. Charlotte had to learn how to be present for all of those outcomes without emotionally collapsing under the weight of them.

What a Typical Day Looks Like

I asked Charlotte to walk me through a standard shift, and the answer was that there isn’t really one. But a rough shape exists. She usually starts with a handover from the outgoing team, reviewing which patients are mid-cycle in their chemotherapy, who’s been admitted with treatment complications, and who’s new. She’ll check blood results first thing, because a patient’s neutrophil count or kidney function can determine whether that day’s planned treatment goes ahead or gets postponed – a decision that carries real emotional weight for people who are counting down their cycles.

A large portion of her morning involves preparing and administering chemotherapy. This is meticulous, protocol-heavy work. Every drug is double-checked. Every dose is verified against the patient’s weight, blood results, and treatment plan. The personal protective equipment alone is a ritual – gowning, gloving, handling cytotoxic drugs with a level of care that reflects just how potent they are. Charlotte says she never rushes this part, no matter how busy the ward gets. The consequences of a chemotherapy error are too severe to allow time pressure to creep in.

Afternoons often involve managing side effects – nausea, pain, fatigue, mucositis, psychological distress – and coordinating with the wider multidisciplinary team. Oncology nursing doesn’t happen in isolation. Charlotte works alongside oncologists, radiologists, pharmacists, dietitians, psychologists, palliative care specialists, and social workers. The team meetings, she says, are some of the most intellectually stimulating conversations she’s ever been part of in a clinical setting.

The Emotional Dimension

This is the part Charlotte finds hardest to talk about, and the part I think matters most. She has held the hands of patients who were receiving their diagnosis for the first time. She has sat with families in quiet rooms and watched them try to absorb news that would reorder their entire world. She has cared for patients over months – sometimes over a year – building relationships that go far deeper than anything she experienced in surgical nursing, and then she has been there when those patients died.

She told me about one patient, an older gentleman who’d been on her ward through several rounds of treatment over the course of a year. They’d developed a rapport built on shared dry humour and a mutual appreciation for terrible daytime television. When his condition deteriorated and the decision was made to transition to palliative care, Charlotte was the nurse who sat with his family and helped them understand what the coming days would look like. She was on shift when he died. She went home that evening and cried in her kitchen, then came back the next day and did her job again.

I asked her how she manages that, and she paused for a long time before answering. She said the grief doesn’t go away, and she doesn’t think it should. But she’s learned to carry it differently. The cancer centre has a clinical supervision programme and regular debriefing sessions, which she credits with keeping her functioning. She also runs – long distances, usually alone, usually early in the morning before a shift – and says the physical routine gives her a place to process what her mind can’t always handle in the moment.

A New Zealand Nurse in a UK Cancer Centre

I asked Charlotte whether being a New Zealand-trained nurse made any practical difference in her oncology role, and her answer surprised me. She said the clinical transition was significant – different drug protocols, different documentation systems, different regulatory frameworks – but the deeper adjustment was cultural. New Zealand nursing, she said, trains you to be holistic and patient-centred, and that translated well. But the NHS operates at a scale and pace that Auckland doesn’t, and learning to maintain that holistic focus inside a much larger, more bureaucratic system was a skill she had to develop consciously.

She also said that being an outsider – someone who came to the specialty without preconceptions about how a UK cancer centre works – was sometimes an advantage. She asked questions that locally trained nurses might not have thought to ask, simply because the answers weren’t obvious to her. More than once, those questions led to conversations about why certain things were done a particular way, and whether there might be a better approach.

What She’d Tell Other Kiwi Nurses Considering Oncology

Charlotte’s advice is characteristically direct. First, don’t go into oncology unless you’re prepared to invest in continuous learning – it’s not a specialty you can coast through on general knowledge. Second, be honest with yourself about your emotional capacity, and don’t mistake resilience for suppression. You need to feel the difficult things, she says, or they’ll catch up with you in ways you don’t expect. Third, find your people – the colleagues who understand what the work costs, who will debrief with you honestly, and who will make you laugh when you need it most.

And finally, she says, don’t let the hard parts obscure the extraordinary parts. Oncology nursing is watching someone ring the bell after their final chemotherapy cycle. It’s a patient telling you that your care made an unbearable time bearable. It’s the privilege of being trusted with people’s most vulnerable moments and knowing that your presence made a difference.

Charlotte would hate me for writing this, but she’s one of the finest nurses I know. And if her story encourages even one Kiwi nurse to consider this specialty, then she’ll have to forgive me.

During my first week on the ward, a colleague leaned over and whispered, “Matron’s doing a walk-round in ten minutes.” The effect on the room was immediate. Beds were straightened. Clipboards appeared. Someone wiped down a surface that, to my eye, was already perfectly clean. I stood there in the middle of it all thinking two things. First: who or what is a Matron? And second: should I also be panicking?

In New Zealand, I’d worked in a hospital system with a clear enough structure – charge nurse managers, nurse directors, clinical leads – but the titles and the hierarchy didn’t map onto what I was encountering in the NHS. Nobody had given me a chart. Nobody had sat me down and said, “Right, here’s how this works.” It was just assumed I’d pick it up, the way you’re supposed to absorb the offside rule if you live in England long enough. I didn’t pick it up. I bluffed my way through the first month and quietly Googled things in the staff toilet during breaks.

This article is the guide I wish someone had handed me on day one. If you’re an internationally trained nurse about to start work in the NHS – especially if you’re coming from New Zealand or Australia, where the titles are different enough to cause genuine confusion – consider this your cheat sheet.

The Ward Level: Where You Actually Work

The structure that matters most on a daily basis is the one immediately around you on the ward, and it starts with the staff nurse. That was me – a registered nurse working clinically, delivering hands-on patient care, and reporting to the people above me. In New Zealand, this role is essentially the same, so at least I had one point of familiarity to cling to.

Above the staff nurse is the senior staff nurse or band 6 nurse, depending on how your trust structures things. This is someone with more experience who takes on additional responsibilities like mentoring junior nurses, coordinating shifts, or leading on specific clinical areas. In New Zealand terms, this felt roughly equivalent to a senior nurse or a nurse with a specialty focus, though the banding system adds a layer of formality that doesn’t exist back home.

Then there’s the ward sister or charge nurse – the person who runs the ward day to day. They manage the roster, handle staffing issues, oversee patient flow, and generally hold everything together. This is probably the closest equivalent to a charge nurse manager in New Zealand, though the title “ward sister” threw me at first because it sounded like something from a period drama. I later learned it has deep historical roots in British nursing and is still used widely, regardless of gender, though plenty of trusts now use “charge nurse” as a gender-neutral alternative.

The Banding System – A Quick Detour

I can’t explain the NHS hierarchy without mentioning Agenda for Change, which is the pay and grading framework that underpins everything. Every NHS nursing role sits on a band from 1 to 9, with most registered nurses entering at band 5. Higher bands mean more responsibility, more seniority, and more pay. It sounds simple, and in theory it is, but in practice the banding system shapes everything from job titles to career progression to how people relate to each other on the ward. When someone says “she’s a band 7,” they’re communicating a specific level of authority and expertise in a kind of shorthand that took me weeks to decode. In New Zealand, we have pay scales and step increments, but they don’t carry the same cultural weight in daily conversation.

The Middle Tier: Where Strategy Meets the Ward

This is where it got properly confusing for me. Above the ward sister sits the matron – the figure whose walk-round had caused such alarm on my first week.

A matron in the modern NHS is not the stern, starched-uniform character from old Carry On films, though the cultural echo of that image is definitely still alive. Today’s matron is typically a band 8a nurse who oversees several wards or a clinical area. They’re responsible for clinical standards, patient experience, infection control, and staff governance across their patch. They bridge the gap between what’s happening at the bedside and what’s being decided at a strategic level. If the ward sister keeps the ward running, the matron keeps multiple wards running well and makes sure they meet the trust’s standards.

The reason Matron’s walk-round caused such a stir wasn’t fear, exactly – it was accountability. A matron visiting your ward is essentially a quality check. They’ll notice things. They’ll ask questions. And they have the authority to escalate issues or require changes. My colleagues weren’t afraid of the matron as a person – most of them liked her enormously – but they respected the function she represented. It was my first real glimpse of how the NHS uses hierarchy not just to organise people, but to maintain standards.

In New Zealand, the closest equivalent might be an associate director of nursing or a clinical nurse director, but the matron role carries a particular cultural significance in the UK that doesn’t have a direct parallel back home. It’s a title with weight.

Above the Matron

Beyond the matron, the structure gets more strategic and less visible from the ward floor, but it’s worth knowing about. The head of nursing or deputy director of nursing oversees nursing practice across a larger division or directorate. Above them sits the director of nursing or chief nurse, who is the most senior nurse in the trust and typically sits on the board. This person shapes nursing strategy, workforce planning, and professional standards for the entire organisation.

In New Zealand, the equivalent would be the director of nursing at a district health board – someone I was vaguely aware of but had never personally encountered. The same is broadly true in the NHS. As a staff nurse, you’re unlikely to interact directly with the chief nurse, but their decisions about staffing levels, training budgets, and clinical policy filter down to your ward every single day.

What I Got Wrong and What I Learned

Looking back, the biggest mistake I made wasn’t not knowing the titles – it was not understanding the relationships between them. The NHS hierarchy isn’t just an organisational chart. It’s a system of accountability that flows in both directions. The matron is accountable to the head of nursing for standards on her wards. The ward sister is accountable to the matron. The staff nurses are accountable to the ward sister. But it also flows upward – concerns raised at the bedside can and should travel up the chain, and the structure exists partly to make that possible.

In New Zealand, hospital hierarchies felt a bit flatter and more informal to me. I could knock on my charge nurse manager’s door with a concern and it would often be resolved in that room. In the NHS, the structure is more layered, and navigating it effectively is a skill in itself. Knowing who to escalate to, and when, isn’t just a matter of professional etiquette – it directly affects patient care. I had a situation early on where I was concerned about a patient’s deteriorating condition and wasn’t sure whether to go to the ward sister, the registrar, or the site nurse practitioner. In New Zealand, I’d have known instinctively. Here, I hesitated, and that hesitation cost me time I shouldn’t have lost.

I figured it out. I asked questions – mostly of the healthcare assistants, who knew everything about how the ward actually functioned and were unfailingly generous with their knowledge. I watched how the more experienced nurses operated within the system. And gradually, the hierarchy stopped feeling like an obstacle and started feeling like a framework I could use.

A Note for Other Internationally Trained Nurses

If you’re reading this as a nurse about to start in the NHS, here’s what I’d suggest. First, don’t be embarrassed about not knowing the structure. It’s not intuitive if you’ve trained elsewhere, and most of your colleagues will be happy to explain if you ask. Second, learn the banding system early – it unlocks a lot of the shorthand that people use daily. Third, pay attention to the matron. Not because you should be afraid of them, but because understanding their role helps you understand how the NHS thinks about quality and accountability. And finally, befriend the healthcare assistants. They know where everything is, who everyone is, and how everything actually works. They were my secret weapon, and I owe them more than a few cups of tea.

The NHS hierarchy can feel imposing when you first encounter it. But it exists for a reason, and once you understand it, you can work within it confidently. It took me a few months and more than a few awkward moments, but I got there. You will too.

The first time I bought a pie from a bakery in Bromley, I genuinely thought there’d been a mistake. I’d ordered a chicken and mushroom pie expecting what any self-respecting New Zealander would expect – a full pastry case, golden on all sides, with a solid base you could hold in your hand while you ate it walking down the street. What I got was a ceramic dish of filling with a pastry lid sitting on top like a hat. No base. No sides. Just a soggy little roof over some stew. I stood in the street staring at it, fork in hand, and thought: I have made a terrible decision moving here.

I’m joking. Mostly. But food was one of those unexpected flashpoints in my first few months in London that caught me completely off guard. I’d braced myself for the big stuff – the NMC registration process, the homesickness, the weather. I hadn’t braced myself for the small, daily, sensory ways that being far from home would get under my skin, and almost all of them came back to food.

The Supermarket Identity Crisis

My first trip to a big Tesco near my flat in Bromley was an experience I can only describe as mildly dissociative. Everything looked almost right but wasn’t quite. The milk came in quantities I didn’t recognise. The butter was in brands I’d never seen. I spent ten minutes looking for Whittaker’s chocolate before accepting that it wasn’t going to appear, and then another five minutes standing in the biscuit aisle trying to work out what a digestive was and whether I’d like it. I couldn’t find decent crackers. The bread was different. Even the eggs were a different size. The cheese section was bewildering – an entire wall of cheddars that all looked identical but apparently represented deeply held regional loyalties I wasn’t yet equipped to understand.

None of these things matter individually, and I knew that even at the time. But collectively, they left me feeling strangely unmoored. I think when you move to a country that speaks the same language and shares a lot of the same cultural touchstones, you expect daily life to feel familiar. And it does – right up until you’re standing in a supermarket aisle near tears because you can’t find Marmite and the British version isn’t the same thing no matter what anyone tells you.

The thing nobody warns you about with homesickness is that it doesn’t always arrive as a grand, sweeping sadness. Sometimes it’s just the absence of a specific flavour you didn’t even know you were attached to.

Learning to Love What’s Here

It took me a few months, but I eventually stopped trying to replicate New Zealand in a London postcode and started actually paying attention to what British food does well. And there’s plenty. A proper Sunday roast with all the trimmings is one of the great meals of the world and I’ll defend that position to anyone. The curry scene in London is extraordinary – I’d never had a good vindaloo before moving here, and now I have strong opinions about which places on the high street do the best one. Fish and chips from a genuinely good chippie, eaten out of paper on a bench, is a perfect meal. And the sheer variety of food available in London – the Turkish bakeries, the Vietnamese places in Hackney, the little Ethiopian restaurant I found near work – is something Auckland simply can’t match at that scale.

I also discovered the glory of the M&S food hall, which I now treat as a kind of secular temple. Their ready meals got me through some rough post-shift evenings when I was too tired to cook but too hungry to sleep. No shame in that.

The pies, though – I maintain my position. A pie needs a base.

Coffee, or the Lack Thereof

I need to talk about the coffee, because if you’re a Kiwi moving to London, this is going to be one of your first and most persistent frustrations.

New Zealand has genuinely excellent coffee culture. I don’t say that as some kind of national boast – it’s just a fact. Flat whites were popularised in New Zealand and Australia, and the standard café in any mid-sized Kiwi town will serve you a properly extracted espresso-based coffee with well-textured milk. It’s not a luxury there. It’s a baseline.

London, by contrast, is a city of extremes. There are some absolutely brilliant specialty coffee shops – places where the baristas know their single origins and the milk is stretched beautifully. And there are also vast chain operations where the coffee tastes like it was made by someone who had the concept of espresso described to them over a bad phone line. The middle ground, which is where most New Zealand cafés sit, barely exists here. You’re either getting something wonderful or something tragic, and the wonderful option usually requires a deliberate detour and a longer queue.

Finding My Coffee Routine

In my first few weeks in Bromley, I went through what I now think of as my coffee grief cycle. Denial came first – surely the next place would be better. Then anger – how can a city this size not have consistent coffee? Bargaining followed – maybe if I order a long black instead of a flat white, it’ll be harder to ruin. Depression hit around week three, when I ordered a flat white from a well-known chain and received what I can only describe as hot milk with a rumour of coffee. Acceptance came eventually, but only after I found two local spots that met my standards and committed to visiting them exclusively. One of them is run by an Aussie, which I refuse to acknowledge publicly but am quietly grateful for.

My advice to any Kiwi landing in London: find your coffee place early. Ask other Antipodeans – they will have opinions and they will share them passionately. Check the independent shops first. And if someone offers you instant, it’s perfectly acceptable to politely decline and quietly reassess the friendship.

Food as a Lifeline on Long Shifts

Here’s where the food story connects to the nursing story, because they’re more linked than you might think. When you’re working twelve-hour shifts in an NHS hospital – often nights – food becomes one of your few reliable comforts. A good meal in your break can turn a difficult shift around. A bad one can compound an already rough night.

I learned quickly to meal prep on my days off, partly for health and budget reasons, but partly because having something familiar and homemade waiting in my lunchbox was a small act of self-care that kept me grounded. I’d make big batches of pumpkin soup, lamb and kumara stew, or simple pasta bakes – nothing fancy, but things that tasted like home and reheated well in a staff room microwave.

The other nurses on my ward caught on quickly. One of my colleagues, a Filipino nurse named Joy, started bringing lumpia for the night shift, and a Polish nurse called Magda would bring pierogi. Before long, we had an unofficial food-sharing arrangement on night shifts that became one of the best parts of the job. Nothing bonds a group of tired, overworked nurses at three in the morning quite like someone pulling a Tupperware container of homemade food out of the fridge and passing it around.

I brought a pavlova to the ward Christmas party. Half my colleagues had never had one. It vanished in minutes, and for the rest of December I was known exclusively as the pavlova nurse, which is frankly the best professional reputation I’ve ever had.

Making Peace With It All

I’ve been in London for a while now, and my relationship with food here has settled into something comfortable. I’ve stopped mourning what I can’t get and started appreciating what I can. I’ve found a shop in central London that stocks some New Zealand products – Whittaker’s, Pic’s peanut butter, a few other essentials – and I allow myself an occasional overpriced trip there when I need a taste of home. My parents send a care package every few months with biscuits and lollies, and I ration them like they’re medical supplies.

But more than that, I’ve come to see food as one of the most interesting parts of being an immigrant. It forces you to notice things you’d normally take for granted. It connects you to other people who are also far from home. And it gives you these small, daily rituals – the morning coffee, the meal-prepped lunch, the Sunday roast at the pub – that slowly turn a foreign city into your city.

I still miss a proper New Zealand meat pie more than I probably should. But I’ve made my peace with the pastry lid. I just eat around it and pretend it’s a stew. Which, if we’re being honest, is exactly what it is.