The Government says it will now guarantee 300 spots a month in managed isolation for people in the health and disability sectors.
Those groups of workers, who are urgently needed in this country, currently have to compete for scarce MIQ spaces with other travellers.
Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society spokesperson Andrew Stapleton told Morning Report it's a step, but more needs to be done.
"We've been arguing that we need a centralised process that is looking across the whole of the barriers to getting ICU nurses particularly and specialists into the country.
"That requires one agency to take control of this issue to advertise interview, to sort out visas, to get nurses through MIQ."
Stapleton said DHBs now have approval to recruit new nurses, but that means they will all be competing with each other to get new nurses on board.
He said recruitment is vital.
"We need to vigorously recruit all varieties of nurses, I think we need to train up, we need to get all nurses who are prepared to be trained as ICU nurses in New Zealand, trained in ICU. They should be there every day of the week at the moment, and we should backfill them with all the graduate nurses who are coming through nursing."
Stapleton said, from his point of view, what he cares about is preventable deaths and working on increasing ICU capacity is just as important as vaccination.
"We must vaccinate until the models are showing us that the system can cope with what happens when we open up.
"There's two parts of that, there's the prevention part, that's the vaccination, and then there's the capacity part. I would like to see a lot more emphasis, and money frankly, spent on the capacity part, so that we can open up earlier."
