National’s solution to nurses is more immigration (of course our Health System is falling over)

1. In the short term increased immigration is essential to fix the problem. For the last 3 years we have had just about zero inwards immigration, probably for the first time since 1820! So inevitably there will be increased pressures, especially since there is now a substantial outflow as younger New Zealanders have been able to finally leave the country.

   It is surely self evident to anyone that we have missed out an about 150,000 inwards migrants over the last 3 years, by that, I mean well qualified people coming here to settle permanently. A fair number are always in the health sector. I would note that 50,000 inwards migrants per year is about 1% of the population and is a lower figure than the overall trend of the last 30 years when inwards migrants have been closer to 1.5% of the NZ population.

   So yes, the immediate solution to a large number of the workforce issues is more inwards immigration.

   • Agreed Wayne.

     Instead we let Disc Jockeys in….

   • @ Wayne, Firstly there was immigration during Covid – 120,000+ people came during Covid.

     The problem is that NZ’s low wages, increasingly stupid policies and higher crime rates are causing people in particular professional people on higher wages, to leave while the low waged on benefits and with issues, stay. Both domestic and migrants. Replacing qualified professionals leaving NZ with more bakers assistants and their families or 501’s is not going to help retain NZ professionals.

     NZ is going in the wrong direction with more people who are low waged and skilled and can’t cope in NZ, and thus pushing more problems onto our social services that are at breaking point and more people who are high needs and need more government’s money and support, are shared between.

     Retention of qualified medical people is the problem in NZ – adding 200,000 new patients and 14,000 new students onto NZ doctors and teachers and telling them to make do, is a huge part of the problem. They could have had a visa ONLY for doctors and qualified nurses to come into NZ. Why push in 200,000+ many of whom don’t need to speak English and thus will not be qualified for the majority of jobs in NZ and actually need skills allocated to them, instead.

     Likewise the tax rises that seem to be targeting higher waged professionals, also leading to qualified experts leaving like doctors.

     • The 120,000 who came in during the last 3 years were already New Zealand citizens or permanent residents. Not new immigrants.

       • Wayne,

         Not sure about that.

         In September 2021 Kris Faafoi announced a pathway to residency for a staggering one hundred and sixty five thousand “migrant workers”…..AND their families. Potentially, that could have been multiple family members for each migrant worker. Do the math there and we could be looking at half a million new residents. It was accepted the overwhelming majority of these new immigrants and their families hail from India and China.

         It should be remembered that to qualify as an essential worker in NZ, you need to earn a whopping $27 an hour.

         • Thinking Man the migrant numbers alone from that visa, is already exceeding 200,000 because each migrant can bring in others…. 14,000 new children alone are coming on on the ‘skills visas; and half the kids can’t speak English and the parents didn’t need to speak English either.

           You wonder what sort of skilled job requires no English – it seems the visas was not about medical skills at all, you have to wonder why they are so keen to overload NZ services – private practise?

           Not sure how adding more children and pensioners are helping the skills shortage unless child labour is back and children and pensioners are the highest users of the health system, so it’s dumb meets dumber, to allow these family members onto visas.

         • All of the 165,000 were already here. On work visas. Usually relatively low skill work, which is why they had not previously qualified for permanent residency.

   • What is obvious are the numbers you quote have not been matched by the dollars needed for infrastructure investment as our population grew. No disputing this fact.

     • Yes but they need to actually fix the infrastructure before adding the people or they are making it worse. Neoliberals have bought in loads of low paid, low skilled people into NZ – many of whom seem to not be able to cope or flourish here using infrastructure.

   • Or we could pay New Zealanders appropriate wages to be nursing orderlies, which is what most of the imported ‘skilled’ healthcare workers were.

   • Up till 1984, we didnt import nurses from overseas. We TRAINED OUR OWN.

     From time to time I hear of graduate nurses being unable to find jobs, and this can be directly attributed to the health authorities and providers opting to import nurses from overseas.

   • The growth via population increase model has all sorts of consequences, such as homelessness and declining home ownership. The desperate open slather 3 storey build in urban areas undermines the transport spine planning of the last decade and the 2050 zero carbon target. And with who knows what consequences for wastewater and sewage infrastructure.

     We need to train and retain more health workers locally – zero repayment of TD for those who work here (and a 10% pa writeoff down to zero).

   • Wrong, the problem is immigration driving down wages and then the locally trained nurses and doctors leave for greener pastures and don’t come back for twenty-five years if at all.

     Martyn: “Rather than debt enslave the next generation of nurses, we offer free training, free student allowances and free public transport and free accommodation to study to be a nurse AND THEN bond those nurses to NZ for 5 years! ”

     Exactly. Most of that was available in the 60’s, 70s and into the 80’s. Nurses didn’t get free public transport but late shift taxi chits. I am not sure they were even bonded – there was no incentive to leave except curiosity. If NZ could afford that scheme when it was a poorer country, hey Labour, why not now?

2. NZ’s rampant mass immigration obsession rather than domestic training, holds the rest of the country to ransom and is the reason there is so much poverty, low wages, lack of professionals, social services in crisis etc.

   It is not the migrants fault in the majority of cases, it is the NZ governments policy since the 1980’s that have destroyed NZ education and training and replaced educational responsibility and decent wages, with hundreds of thousands of very low skilled migrants with so called ‘essential skills’ (chefs, labourers, support workers, low level IT support, retail and fast food ‘managers’) and their families to support their low waged economy. The low skilled bring their parents who are often pensioners or children and need high levels of NZ medical, social and financial support.

   We are in a pandemic and have nearly 1 million people coming into NZ through immigration in the last decade, another 200,000 on their way now, but they only have 539 doctor training places for domestic medical students. NZ currently imports two doctors for every one who graduates in some f**ked up neoliberal way to pretend to save money.

   https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/300614570/auckland-uni-calls-for-more-medical-student-places-to-help-ease-doctor-shortage

   However many doctors coming to NZ don’t do so well and leave, so the policy doesn’t work. Other migrant doctors come with issues, or we have criminals who are preferred to them!

   Public Health : The Silent Crisis
   http://werewolf.co.nz/2014/12/public-health-the-silent-crisis/

   Mom killed 3 daughters in New Zealand home after moving from South Africa
   https://nypost.com/2021/09/17/mom-killed-3-daughters-after-moving-to-new-zealand-home/

   Dunedin doctor murder trial: Slain teenager Amber-Rose Rush’s final messages
   https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/dunedin-doctor-murder-trial-slain-teenager-amber-rose-rushs-final-messages/7FMSV26KKDUPUPEYVLX55CVOYE/?c_id=1&objectid=12282380

   The obvious thing is to stop giving visas to high needs, low skilled people and families and concentrate only on professional medical skills (not the support workers they can’t administer medicine or do operations!!!) and only allow visas for qualified doctors and nurses into NZ, but that seems to be beyond them, and instead they keep adding hundreds of thousands of new patients into NZ in the hope that a few professionals make it though! Truely Crazy, unless you want to destable our free social welfare systems and turn it over to large private practise US style.

   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/454310/doctor-excluded-from-one-off-residence-visa-says-govt-change-makes-no-sense

   Emails reveal residency pleas of rural GP, convicted criminals granted stay
   https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/politics/residency-limbo-emails-reveal-pleas-of-rural-gp-while-convicted-criminals-granted-stay/

   Very poor countries like Cuba don’t seem to have problems like NZ training medical staff and having high literacy. It is not about money!!!

   • “It is not the migrants fault in the majority of cases, it is the NZ governments policy since the 1980’s ……………”
     Exactery! And many of them having been LIED to by “officials” and their idiotic policies. We’ve actually CREATED our own set of immigrant refugees that we’ve tipped out after having exploited, used and abused them.
     And btw, it’s far worse now than it ever was in the ’80s – silly as it was then.

     I’d love to grab a few of those ‘officials’ by the scruff of their well-endowed necks and march them off to some of the places where immigrants and their families have lost just about everything (land, housing, well-being) by believing NZ’s ‘officials’ and their facile policies. And will they ever be held accountable? Like hell. Instead they are rewarded by some new gig where they’ll wreak havoc (keep an eye on ACC).

     And it never ceases to amaze me how some of the more intelligent and capable Labour Munsters and Associate Munsters can’t see through the bullshit – probably because they think outwardly “nice” officials necessarily means they’re capable and public service oriented. Some of them should never be allowed to hold any sort of role in the public service in future.

     /endrant

     Incidentally, I’ve been telling prospective immigrants with appropriate skills NZ needs at the moment not to come to NZ since about 2016 – there are far better places to go.

3. National caused many of the problems we have now and these are long term problems (that will take decades to fix) Unfortunately immigration is but one of our problems. Immigration has also been used as a weapon by National who have no problem bringing in hundred of thousand of people with no care for the negative impact this has in other areas like wages, housing, infrastructure, race and Treaty relations all of these have to be balanced not rushed. The pandemic highlighted our reliance on foreign labour and I think many NZers had no idea of this until Covid hit us. The whole world is in a mess NZers need to look around check out the facts and the source of those facts. We need to work towards long term solutions we cannot carry on with our band aide mentality and we cannot keep kicking the can down the road. Nationals mass immigration is nothing but a band aide the new health measures of Labour is a long term plan but requires change, patience and therefore deserves a chance as nothing else has worked.

4. Short term practices and policies are why we are in this mess. Our current government and National both knew we have an ageing population and that Maori and PI would make up the bulk of the working age population but they failed to invest sufficiently in these groups, instead the National party under John Key brought in almost a million people. This needs to stop we need to be very selective who we bring in and we need to plan better long term. Until this is done we will struggle and we will also have huge inequalities and equity issues.

   • Totally agree with you. When we changed up the system of paid employment and training, those with the least money (Predominately brown) were stuck at the bottom owith no way out. And generationally that’s been reinforced over and over with the skills loss compensated for by bringing in migrants.

     I, like many people, assumed the underclass grew because of poor social provision and high housing costs. But thinking about it, it particularly grew because we didnt invest in training people like we once did.

   • Wow John Key brought in nearly a million people while in power, yet our population only increased by 500,000. Hope you’re not in charge of anything important.

     • I am not in charge of the census yobi and what happened to that

5. Mart, I agree with you about the social contract thing.

   Back in the 70’s rather than go to Uni, many, many jobs were entered straight out of high school followed by the old NZ Certificate system or similar. Trades apprenticeships, nurses, teachers, health inspectors, lab workers, social workers etc. In paid employment from Day 1, no expensive student debt to pay off. Stable employment through 1 to 3 year post training bonds (Depending on the length of study) Bonds could also be transferred amongst employers eg: DHBs, private clinics etc

   I dont know why we changed this. It worked so well. People had guaranteed income, got trained, did on the job work as well. Were able to buy houses sooner and paid tax sooner.

   I was ruminating on this and I think a South Auckland/ Porirua (maybe some others) scheme for nursing and medical staff (radiographers or where ever the needs are) could be piloted where we select low income people to enter into this old style model on a limited basis. So Paid training mix of polytech and on the job at minimum wage or living wage.

   Many of these people have dropped out of education and further education as they have had to support families or just to survive. Some kind of capability or IQ test might be needed as they may not have traditional educational minimums. This approach targets the poorest and most affected whilst likely ensuring greater numbers of Maori and Pasifica in the Health Professions.

   If we did it on a smaller scale over and above traditional provision, then we could evaluate its effectiveness at the end of the 3 year post training bond. How much did it cost/save? What social advantage did it achieve? What outcomes did we see? Then maybe we can look at extending the scheme into other profession’s (or across the board) if it works.

   I suspect that to break the paradigm that we are in, we may need to return to something like this across the board. Nothing would return us to a more equal productive society sooner. (Assuming they have houses to live in as well!)

6. We need to import, train and retain nurses. It’s that fucking bad

   • Nurses can’t do everything and can’t get the hospital waiting lists down, we actually need doctors before anything else. They keep filling up the hospitals with more administrators and health workers, then wonder why they can’t get the hospital waiting list down for operations, which is why people are in hospital!

     We need more skilled people not more unskilled people everywhere!

     • We need both. Currently the news is that the crisis is primarily amongst nursing with some operations cancelled due to a lack of theatre nursing staff. I would also argue that nurses can do more with more cross over training as is happening in some countries to take the burden off Drs.

7. Martyn, I totally agree with the free training for health workers including dentists. All their fees should be paid for and a generous allowance paid and bonding. Perhaps the medical schools should be expanded as well. Blame National in the 1990s for the current system. I remember challenging Eric Roy back then predicting that dental costs would be sky high as a result of his party’s policies. He didn’t want to know. Blinkered idiot.

8. National and solutions
   , now there’s an oxymoron!

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