Andrew Little delivers, nurses are still complaining and why Labour are still wrong
No sooner had Little announced this enormous package for nurses…
Health Minister Andrew Little announces plan to boost health worker numbers amid ‘extreme pressures’
- The Government has promised to train more doctors, nurses and radiographers as part of a package to boost the healthcare workforce
- It will also will ease the process for overseas nurses and provide up to $10,000 in financial support for registration costs, and set up an immigration support service
- A co-ordinated and enhanced national and international healthcare recruitment campaign will also be launched
..their representatives were on AM Show still complaining.
Nurses are like Students, Farmers and Feminists in that they are never happy.
Why must free market neoliberal solutions that got us into this clusterfuck in the first place remain the answer?
Right now our public hospital system is falling over BECAUSE OF COURSE IT WILL FALL OVER!
We just went through a once in a century pandemic, our grotesquely underfunded public health system needs to be nationalised and fully funded by a taxation system that lifts the yoke from working people and puts it on the corporates and the speculators.
Anyone reading Comrade Ian Powell on our blog will see how blinded Labour have been by the corporate consultants who have looked to carve out their own interests over public health issues…
I began by recognising that the incoming Labour-led government in 2017 inherited from its National-led predecessor a health system in crisis due to severe workforce shortages. Because of its centrality a workforce crisis is by definition a health system crisis.
However, while knowing this to be so, the new government largely ignored the pre-pandemic crisis and the pressures driving it such shortages, increasing acute demand greater than population growth, and worsening illnesses in communities largely due to social determinants of health.
The effect of this deteriorating situation impacted “…severely on access to planned surgery and other treatments, overcrowded emergency departments, availability of hospital beds, and compromised capacity to diagnose patients in a clinically timely manner.”
Covid-19 was not the cause of the workforce crisis; it was an accelerator.
…on Public Health, Labour zigged when they should have zagged. They allow all the other Ministry’s ride rough shod over Labour’s goals, yet on public health they’ve taken the corporate advice over the Ministry.
We always seem to fall back on more free market solutions from people with a vested interest in that outcome.
Take our nursing shortage, all the Right are offering is to open the immigration flood doors exactly like Key did so that poor old Auckland has to once again deal with unfettered mass migration that cause our rents to explode and infrastructure to grind to gridlock again.
All National and ACT is offering is to import nurses RATHER THAN actually solve the fucking problem!
And here’s the fucking problem
1 – Our tax yoke is locked onto the poor citizen rather than the wealthy elites so we never have the money we need for public health.
2 – Rather than import more nurses, grow and keep who we have! Rather than debt enslave the next generation of nurses, we offer free training, free student allowances and free public transport and free accomodation to study rot be a n nurse AND THEN bond those nurses to NZ for 5 years!
We need to reignite the social contract between our essential service staff like teachers, police, nurses, drs etc etc etc – we will pay your education, you stay here and give us 5 years service.
That way we don’t simply train local nurses, give them. debt and they flee overseas for better pay to clear that debt!!!!
Why aren’t we looking at real solutions like protecting our nurses and promoting them and enabling them rather than use them as cheap tokens on a rigged free market game that we will always lose?
Little’s plan will work in that it deflates the media attacks and most people will see being offered $10 000 as a huge incentive that drowns out all the complaints.
Well played by the Minister, still doesn’t get us closer to solving the deeper issues, but that’s politics isn”t it?
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As soon as security services was installed in all hospitals they became a target.
Others have done a better job of explaining the National Security Crises.
More people understand how the evolution of the enemy from Russians to counter terror to corona understand that we are now all of us the enemy.
And even more people ignore it.
Few people have done the work of showing how exposed the Security Crises has made New Zealand.
I think our government has come up with a good plan to address our Nurses and Doctors chronic shortage in our country. Also perhaps they could also look at providing accommodation for our Nurses. We use to have a Nurses home attached to our Hutt Hospital its was a big block. Something like this would be great as accommodation is also a major barrier and this would be yet another incentive for student Nurses and foreign Nurses coming in. If the accommodation is in close proximity to the hospitals even better especially if the Nurses work late hours or shifts. Its could be temporary until the Nurses are able to find alternatives come on LABOUR lets do this.
After campaigning on here since this blog started for health.
it is great to see you Martyn finally kicking Andrew Little’s ass.
I agree with every word Ian Powell and you say.
What labour have just done will barely touch the sides of what is needed.
I think our government has come up with a good plan to address our Nurses and Doctors chronic shortage in our country. Also perhaps they could also look at providing accommodation for our Nurses. We use to have a Nurses home attached to our Hutt Hospital its was a big block. Something like this would be great as accommodation is also a major barrier and this would be yet another incentive for student Nurses and foreign Nurses coming in. If the accommodation is in close proximity to the hospitals even better especially if the Nurses work late hours or shifts. Its could be temporary until the Nurses are able to find alternatives come on LABOUR lets do this.
According to the union Ian Powell used to head, the top salary for an NZ specialist doctor is 60% of the starting Australian salary. So you give the students cheap or free education and bond them for 5 years. Fine, except the training time for a specialist is 7-10 years after that and the bond has long expired as Australia looks very attractive to the new specialist.
NZ must pay them a lot more, it’s as simple as that.
It would help if exunion boss Little stopped calling out nurses for not excepting a faulty of and no back pay as was promised.
I would help,if nurses were respected and listened to and I’d if bosses made them feel they were worth looking after.I can only speak for Chch but I imaging it is not different else were .No close parking so nurses get up early in the morning to grab parking spots and then have a sleep until they start work.The parking provided is in a very desolate part of town not somewhere anyone would want to walk to at night and more so if a woman.
Sadly car parking is an issue everywhere Trevor. Here in the Waikato, 8500 people are employed, where do you find that amount of carports?
Prioritize nurses over allied health.and you”ll end up with a massive issue.
Of course corporates and governance level managers get priority( you won’t see them catch a bus at all hours of the morning)
Martyn, your assessment on this is spot on. The right wing were whinging Little wasn’t doing enough and are whinging because he has a solution. Therefore we know this is a winner. I would trust Little more than I would trust a certain troll to say anything sensible about Labourer ( oops Labour)
Nursess are still complaining Martyn because they have been working like dogs to take care of us, Labour has done nothing about their work loads in 5 Years, Little an ex union boss dissed their union and now he is paying some f….ing advertising agency or coms person far more money than they get to have a pretty little recruitment ad using Shortland St.
Pretty bloody obvious why nurses are still angry I would say.
I didn’t hear any barking when I was at the hospital not long ago perhaps our Nurse still had the tape on their mouth that Johnathan Coleman left there.
I’m surprised it was only tape to her mouth and not a knife to her throat, the Coleman way.
but but, its the best Coleman can do!!!!!
Unfortunately Martyn you’re argument would be better served by more in-depth analysis and research. Throwing around generalisations like $10000 dollar a year increases are very misleading and simply repeats Government spin at best.
Nurses are neither winging or greedy, as often implied here, but are instead deeply concerned about the ongoing sustainability of our health system as well as being caring and often heroic in their efforts to keep our failing health system going. What is often forgotten in all the Government spin is that we are not just dealing with a crisis relating to a pandemic but systemic issues bought about by poor management and planning over many years by many different Governments. We all have a vested interest in resolving this crisis and playing politics and stigmatising the low hanging fruit of New Zealand nurses and their organisation is beneath us all.
Let’s look at Government Restructuring of the health system as one area of concern. We as New Zealanders have learnt, to our detriment (eg Auckland Super City), over many years and under various governments that administrative restructuring and centralisation does not improve service provision – quite the opposite. One of the major objectives, whether acknowledged or not, of any restructuring is to remove duplication of services and streamline management structures.
This in reality will mean, in a health setting, ultimately less timely access to higher level services in the regions. “For more patients, this may mean we offer them to go to a provider outside their normal district”. (Fepulea’i Margie Apa, the chief executive of the interim Health New Zealand). Efficiencies can and probably will be made in streamlining middle management within the new Health NZ entity. This normally means savings can be made but those savings, rather than being redirected to service provision at the “pointy end” of the organisation, are used to pad out upper management salaries in acknowledgement of their additional responsibility.
The only way to improve health outcomes is to invest in service provision, both staff and infrastructure, at the coal face. The continued denigrating of the nursing profession by Andrew Little makes him a lame duck minister.