Nursing reports

A new report by the Auditor-General shows the Government must do more to build capacity in the public health system instead of outsourcing to the private sector, NZNO says.

The report titled Providing equitable access to planned care treatment found that despite reforms in recent years designed to end the postcode lottery in the health care system, inequities for Māori, Pacific peoples, those living rurally and disabled people continue.

New Zealand Nurses Organisation Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa (NZNO) chief executive Paul Goulter says the report confirms what the public already knows - that elective services in the public system are neither equitable nor timely.

"The Auditor-General found the Coalition Government’s targets are having a perverse effect whereby some districts are not accepting referrals because they don’t have the resources they need to meet the required timeframes for assessing or treating people.

"This shows the targets for the political stunts they are. Targets won’t work without additional funding to create the capacity which will enable them to be met. 

"This confirms what our nurses across the health sector are saying and echoes concerns NZNO has been raising for some time."

Paul Goulter says the same vulnerable populations missing out on planned care are the same people who are struggling to get in to see their doctors in the first place to be referred.

"The Auditor-General is warning the Government that it’s push for even greater outsourcing to the private sector could lead to greater inequities. Outsourcing just strips capacity from the under-staffed primary health care sector and the under-funded hospital sector.

"There is only one way the Government can fix the health crisis and that’s by properly funding and staffing a quality public health system for all," Paul Goulter says.

Increases in primary care funding announced today must be passed onto nurses to fix chronic staff shortages so New Zealanders can get in to see health care professionals faster, the Nurses Organisation Tōputanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa (NZNO) says.

The Government funds GP clinics based on the number of enrolled patients they have, regardless of the services they receive, through what’s called the capitation system.

Health Minister Simeon Brown today announced capitation funding for this year is set to increase to 13.89%.

NZNO College of Primary Care Nurses chair Tracey Morgan says nurses are urging primary care employers to pass this funding increase onto them via their wages, Tracey Morgan says.

"This will help stem the flow of nurses out of primary care and into hospitals.

"A skilled nursing workforce is desperately needed to keep care in the community, ensure vaccination targets are met, ease pressure on hospital emergency departments and prevent long term conditions worsening.

"During collective agreement bargaining last year, primary care nurses were 16-18% behind their hospital-based colleagues in pay. The employers told the union that if the money was available, they would willingly pass it on to nurses."

Primary care nurses will receive a 3% increase in July through their collective agreement which also gave them a further 5% on ratification earlier this year, Tracey Morgan says.

"However, this will still have them 10% behind hospital nurses with the same qualifications.

"Simeon Brown says this funding boost is help patients see their doctor and nurse earlier. The ability to recruit and retain primary health nurses is vital to achieving this," Tracey Morgan says.

Te Whatu Ora theatre nurses and health care assistants at Whangārei Hospital who are NZNO members will strike next Tuesday over concerns about chronic and ongoing staff shortages.

The New Zealand Nurses Organisation Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa (NZNO) perioperative nurses and health care assistants – from the surgical admission unit, theatre and post anaesthetic units – will undertake three rolling four-hour strikes beginning at 7am and ending at 7pm on Tuesday 24 June.

NZNO delegate and perioperative nurse Steph Moule says the nurses and health care assistants are standing up for their patients.

“This stand is part of the current collective agreement bargaining between NZNO and Te Whatu Ora. Our patients deserve safe staffing levels. Not burnt out nurses and health care assistants who don’t have time to give them the care they need.

“Our patients deserve better. Our members will not accept patient safety being threatened by unrealistic budget cuts.”

Steph Moule says overworked nurses and health care assistants are also facing an effective pay cut.

“The latest offer made by Te Whatu Ora offered a 1% wage increase this year backdated and a further 1% next April. That doesn’t keep up with the cost of living and will see nurses and health care workers and their whānau going backwards financially,” she says.

Increases in primary care funding must be passed onto nurses to fix chronic staff shortages so New Zealanders can get in to see their doctors, the Nurses Organisation Tōputanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa (NZNO) says.

The Government funds GP clinics based on the number of enrolled patients they have, regardless of the services they receive, through what’s called the capitation system.

NZNO College of Primary Care Nurses chair Tracey Morgan says a capitation increase of 4% last year was widely condemned as forcing general practices to hike their fees.

Capitation funding for this year is set to increase to 9.13% conditional on general practices agreeing to limit any fee rises to 3%, according to documents leaked to NZ Doctor. The cost-pressure uplift for those who don’t limit their fee rises will be an increase of 6.43%.

Nurses are urging primary care employers to pass this funding increase onto them via their wages, Tracey Morgan says.

"This will help stem the flow of nurses out of primary care and into hospitals.

"A skilled nursing workforce is desperately needed to keep care in the community, ease pressure on hospital emergency departments and prevent long term conditions worsening.

"During collective agreement bargaining last year, primary care nurses were 16-18% behind their hospital-based colleagues in pay. The employers told the union that if the money was available, they would willingly pass it on to nurses."

Primary care nurses will receive a 3% increase in July through their collective agreement which also gave them a further 5% on ratification earlier this year, Tracey Morgan says.

"However, this will still have them 10% behind hospital nurses with the same qualifications.

"The Government claims it is focused on shorter wait times for New Zealanders to get in to see their doctor. The ability to recruit and retain primary health nurses is vital to achieving this," Tracey Morgan says.

Kerri Nuku, Kaiwhakahaere
NZNO Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa

This coalition Government punched women in the face when it recently cut and made it even more tricky to progress pay equity claims.

I want to offer a wāhine Māori perspective, in the hope to keep us inspired and motivated while we continue to stand up and fight back for women’s rights in Aotearoa.

Traditionally, wāhine Māori exercised power and authority and influenced the socio-economic development and cultural wellbeing of Māori communities. All their roles as politically astute leaders, defenders of the land and environment, the birthers of the next generation were embraced.

Through the continuous violence of coloniality, wāhine Māori have defended their people, their culture, their lands and language.

In 1975, Whina Cooper led one of the most important hikoi of its time, galvanising the Māori people to defend against the ongoing loss of Māori land.

Last year saw the largest political rally in our nation’s history, when wāhine Māori guided hikoi mo te Tiriti across the country, while wāhine Māori politicians defended their honour in Parliament against the Treaty Principles Bill.

People marched under the kaupapa of tino rangatira (self-determination) and kotahitanga (unity), standing shoulder to shoulder as Māori were joined by others of all ethnicities and religions. Even many of our NZNO tangata Tiriti members. All of them, refused to accept the racist anti Māori policies of the current Government.

However, the unfettered political power proposes yet more attacks not just on Māori, but us as women too. Its latest missile comes in the form of Regulatory Standards Bill, which attacks indigenous rights, environmental protection and would also remove the obligation for the Crown to consider Te Tiriti o Waitangi when drafting laws and setting regulation.

As a union, we are also concerned that bill will support the Government’s plan for deregulation which would diminish the mana of our profession as nurses, midwives and kaiawhina – lines of work dominated by women.

Wāhine Māori are also leading the fight against that bill which has appropriately been described by lawyer Tania Waikato as the Treaty Principles Bill No.2.

Wāhine Māori can also be seen fighting against this Government’s efforts to create another ‘stolen generation’ by taking out a clause in a child welfare law which means a Māori child in State care can be given to non-Māori people to raise, creating more disconnection of that child from their culture.

Regardless of what the fight is, all wāhine Māori across the different fronts or issues have things in common: A passion for whakapapa, power in unity, humility, political will and astuteness.

I don’t expect non-Māori women to fight like wāhine Māori, but at least to take note as we have been fighting systemic attacks longer than anyone else in this country.

The stories of women like the late Whina Cooper and Tariana Turia, along with today’s Annette Sykes and Linda Munn are for all of us to learn from.

Wāhine Māori and non- Māori nurses, midwives and kaiawhina need to be united now more than ever before. It is no longer enough to just go to work and do our jobs. We must make ourselves aware of the issues. We must not leave it to the aunties among us, to fight the fight. If we don’t, the rights of all women will continue to be attacked.

Anne Daniels, President
NZNO Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa

Attacks on women by the current Coalition government, in recent weeks, are unprecedented. The silencing of women’s voice to push back through lack of accepted legislative process (e.g. select committee submissions) has gutted our right to be heard.

Two weeks ago, I presented at the NZNO Neonatal College of Nurses Aotearoa Conference. The main thrust of my presentation was that there is an expectation, by those who hold power over us, that ‘nurses play nice in their sandbox’. In other words, nurses, midwives, health care assistants, kaiawhina and student nurses should ‘stay in our box’ as David Seymour would have it and let others decide and speak for us. I countered this narrative and said it was up to us to change that by being the first one in the room to stand up, even when no-one else would and expect that the rage inherent in the oppression and inequities we experience, to galvinise action by rising up. Maranga Mai!

And here we are being told that we need to be civil by a government who has just ripped the pay equity legislation process out from under 33 ongoing claims, 10 of which were ours (NZNO), and told that the goal posts had shifted higher, to make it near on impossible for hundreds of thousands of undervalued, under privileged women, many of whom are our members, to achieve equity albeit pay equity, kiwisaver equity, equity of opportunity or anything else you can think of. Calls for ‘civility’ in politics are used by those in power who are engaged in systems of oppression to silence dissent, maintain hegemonic power structures, and retain patriarchal, capitalist norms.

History shows us that when women are galvinised by anger to overthrow oppression, we will never shut up until the change we need for ourselves, our families and our communities, occurs. Why are we angry? Why are we attending quickly organized protests all around the country? Why were there thousands of us standing on the parliament lawn on budget day afternoon?

$12.8 billion dollars, set aside for women’s pay equity claim processes, have been stolen from 180,000 low income, female-dominated workforces, many of them work in health care. But the changes to the legislation have also stolen the human right to be paid equally to a man for the same work, from our future generations. That’s $71,111 stolen from each of those 180,000 women today and too much to count for the future. Theres’ more. Budget day saw the promised ‘money in the back pocket’ disappear, never to be seen again. Women are paying the price. Pay Equity was a campaign win for women after decades of fighting, speaking up and protesting in this country. We will not stay silent, nor will we stay still until our right to be equally valued in all spheres of our lives are embedded in everything that matters to us.

One strategy that every member, everywhere can engage in is the ‘Peoples Select Committee’ led by past MP Marilyn Waring (put link here). We will not accept decisions being made about us, without us.

Why do we need to think about this. Poverty is a public health problem and requires a properly funded public health response. Marc Daalder (Newsroom) said this budget is a fiscal timebomb of unlimited liabilities.

The cuts made by this government will impact on the health and wellbeing of most of us. Without a fully funded infrastructure that supports education, affordable access to publicly fully funded health services and care, provided by culturally appropriate healthcare professionals and care givers, where and when its needed, healthy homes for all, jobs for all paid with at least a living wage that supports choice, the costs to the health system and this nation will be exponential downstream.

Our nation is calling out for all of us to Stand Up and Fight Back. Together we must win. We cannot wait for others to do it for us. Sisters must do it for themselves.

Representing a third of the pay equity claims scrapped by the Coalition Government, NZNO is throwing its full support behind the People’s Select Committee on Pay Equity.

Members of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa (NZNO) had 12 pay equity claims being progressed across the health sector including aged care, primary health care, hospices, Plunket, community health and laboratories when the scheme was gutted on 6 May.

These claims covered almost 10,000 nurses, health care assistants, allied health workers and administration staff. A further 35,000 NZNO Te Whatu Ora members had their pay equity review halted by the changes, meaning their pay would again fall behind.

NZNO Primary Health Care Nurses College chair Tracey Morgan says it was devastating to the 5000 primary health care members that their claim was scuppered without warning or legitimate reason.

“It was antidemocratic and an attack on women for the Government not to have consulted the workers whose lives they were changing. Primary and community health care nurses, like their hospice, Plunket and aged care counterparts, accepted lower wage increases in their collective agreements on the understanding they were likely to receive pay equity settlements.

“Now they can have their say through the People’s Select Committee on Pay Equity.

“The committee of 10 former women MPs from across the political spectrum are strong wahine who helped establishment the previous system to address the gender discrimination which has kept down their wages their whole working lives.”

Most New Zealanders – 68 percent – believe the Government should have consulted on the changes, a new poll released today found.

Tracey Morgan says NZNO urges all its members to submit their views to the Select Committee so they can be heard when it meets in August.

More than 370 Te Toka Tumai Auckland Te Whatu Ora theatre nurses have begun a month-long on-call strike over short-staffing which has forced them to do involuntary overtime.

It involves members of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa (NZNO) working at Auckland City Hospital, Starship Hospital and Greenlane Hospital. Perioperative nurses are those working in preoperative, theatre and postoperative care.

NZNO delegate and Starship perioperative nurse Haim Ainsworth says the month-long on-call strike follows rolling two-hour strikes by Auckland theatre nurses on 1 May.

“There are chronic and ongoing staff shortages in Auckland’s hospitals which are forcing us to work longer than we should.

“We stay late when we are needed because we care about our patients. Te Whatu Ora needs to ensure our shifts are adequately staffed and we are paid properly for any overtime we have to do.”

Haim Ainsworth says Te Whatu Ora needs to stop taking advantage of the goodwill of perioperative nurses.

“We won’t walk out on our patients. But short staffing which leads to nurses having to frequently do overtime is a risk to patient safety. It prevents nurses having enough time to care properly for their patients and leads to burnout. It not sustainable and its time it stopped,” he says.

Editor:

• The strike began Monday 26 May at 7am and will run until Monday 23 June.
• The “on-call strike” involves perioperative nurses refusing to participate in the on-call roster which results in them having to do overtime they are not properly compensated for.
• NZNO has worked with Te Whatu Ora to ensure Life Preserving Services are in place for the duration of the strike.

Low-paid women health workers have paid for the Coalition Government’s Budget centrepiece - tax incentives for business, New Zealand Nurses Organisation Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa (NZNO) says.

Budget 2025 is largely funded through $12.8 billion saved by gutting the pay equity scheme and scuppering 33 claims, including 13 from NZNO members across the health system including in the care and support, Plunket, primary care and hospice sectors.

NZNO Primary Health Care Nurses College chair Tracey Morgan says the Coalition Government has "utterly failed" to address the crisis in primary and community care which is leaving New Zealanders unable to see their GPs when they need to.

"There is nothing in this Budget to fix the chronic staff shortages that last year resulted in 36% of general practices being unable to take new enrolments. The Government chose not to close the 10% wage gap forcing primary and community care nurses to leave their communities for better paid hospital jobs.

"That would have been a $52.3 million investment with research showing the benefits would have been 14-fold. Instead, the Coalition Government has enabled further privatisation of the health system by giving $164 million to mainly Australian-owned urgent care franchises most New Zealanders can’t afford to go to.

"There is also nothing in this Budget for iwi and Māori health providers who receive the lowest levels of funding in the health system," Tracey Morgan says.

NZNO president Anne Daniels says the Coalition Government’s estimates it can build new facilities or remediate old ones at four hospitals, increase inpatient beds across New Zealand and fund small-scale infrastructure projects for $1 billion is simply "magical thinking".

"The Finance Minister has found her unicorn after all. This is kicking the can down the road for a future government to acknowledge it can’t be done.

"There is no new operational spending for hospitals. The $1.37 billion for cost pressure funding announced in last year’s Budget is not enough to keep the lights on. Our health system is desperately understaffed, and there is no money here to escape the ongoing and entrenched hiring freeze in the sector.

"The health system is not over budget as the Government claims. It is under-funded and under-resourced. Patients need health investments based on their care needs, not an arbitrary bottom line.

"Nicola Willis was right. This is a no BS Budget - a no basic services Budget," Anne Daniels says.

Care and support workers who had their pay equity claims dumped overnight after years of work will meet at Parliament tomorrow to voice their frustration at the Coalition Government’s changes.

The workers are members of New Zealand Nurses Organisation Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa (NZNO) and are some of the 3000 aged residential care health care assistants who were party to the claim.

NZNO care and support delegate Tash Greig says care and support workers were devastated by the changes.

"The Government chose not to prioritise low-paid women in this year’s Budget. They can find funding for landlords and the film industry, but not for women doing some of society’s toughest jobs.

"The work we do has been underpaid and undervalued for generations because we are women. Our claim was almost finalised and would have meant our hard work was finally properly recognised.

"To heap injustice on injustice, these changes were made without warning or consultation. That’s why we are joining the cross-union hui at Parliament tomorrow.

"We want the Government to treat us with the same dignity and respect we treat our elderly and vulnerable patients with - and reverse these changes," Tash Greig says.