Nursing shortages are likely to worsen within five years as more nurses again start deciding to leave the profession.
Hospitals, aged-care homes and other employers face the challenge of trying to head off the threat by improving their working conditions.
The head of Australia's health workforce planning body, Health Workforce Australia, has warned that recent improvements in nursing numbers were in danger of being rolled back unless more was done to make the role more attractive.
Former West Australian health minister Jim McGinty, who was appointed chairman of the then newly created HWA in February last year, told a national GP forum in Melbourne last weekend that the exit rate from the nursing profession - which had fallen sharply in the aftermath of the global financial crisis - was set to return to previous levels without decisive action.
Any worsening of the nursing supply figures would represent a setback for the hard-won improvements of recent years, which were triggered by alarm nearly a decade ago over the rapidly greying nursing workforce and the difficulties many hospitals and care homes faced in recruiting suitable staff.
Various reforms were introduced from 2007 and the national nursing supply has eased significantly, rising from 222,974 nurses in clinical roles in 2005 to 250,786 in 2009.
But HWA CEO Mark Cormack tells Weekend Health a major factor in the improvement was the economic uncertainty caused by the GFC in 2008, after which the exit rate slumped to about 2 per cent from a long-term average of 5 to 6 percent.
He has called for employers to help efforts to retain nurses by assisting them to work to the full extent of their training - something he says many nurses feel they are denied.
"Retention rates can be very much influenced by employers and the nature of the work that nurses do. When you look at why nurses leave the profession, they don't always feel as valued in the work that they do."