A raft of initiatives has been announced to help ease the crisis-level pressures on New Zealand's healthcare system but more needs to be done, experts say.
Staff shortages in all areas of New Zealand’s health sector have hit crisis levels, which have only been exacerbated by Covid-19 and what Health Minister Andrew Little called the "worst flu season in living memory".
After spending weeks denying staff shortages were as serious as frontline staff claimed, Little on Monday announced what he described as a “suite of targeted measures” to train more healthcare workers domestically and bring more doctors and nurses into the country to help address the immediate workforce pressures.
Among the changes announced by Little are making it easier for overseas staff to get registered in New Zealand, while international nurses will get up to $10,000 to pay for their registration.
The Government will also provide $5000 to each non-practising nurse in New Zealand who wants to return to nursing to help them get registered. This scheme was piloted previously and saw about 200 nurses go back into the health workforce. That scheme is now being expanded.
International doctors will also have their salaries covered over a six-week bridging programme and three-month training internships.
Little said he wanted to boost onshore GP training numbers from 200 per year to 300, as well as increasing training slots for radiology registrars.
"The service will offer help with both immigration and registration for all kinds of health workers, including doctors, nurses, midwives and allied health workers such as physiotherapists," he said in an announcement on Monday.
It's just one of a number of initiatives just revealed by the government to boost the number of healthcare workers here. (Source: 1News)
New Zealand Nurses Organisation chief executive Paul Goulter told Breakfast on Tuesday the current situation is “really bad right across the [nursing] sector - it’s not just the hospitals”.
“We’re talking about primary healthcare, Maori and iwi, aged care - particularly difficult to attract and retain staff.
“We did some numbers about six months ago and we believe they’re about 4000 nurses short in New Zealand. I think it’s got worse since then. We’re really staring down the barrel of the crisis despite what [Health Minister Andrew Little] says.”
The health sector is struggling under pressure due to Covid, the flu season and "extreme" staff shortages in the last few weeks. (Source: 1News)
The New Zealand chairwoman of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, Dr Kate Allan, agreed that change was needed, telling Breakfast that Little’s announcement “definitely a step in the right direction and will go a long way to making a difference”.
Allan said there’s “no doubt it’s tough out there at the moment, but this is about moving forward and about solutions”.
“This is an awesome opportunity for us to move forward and … it’s a step in the right direction to get the workforce we need for our hospitals and for our communities."
READ MORE: Health crisis: New measures to attract overseas staff
Goulter said the current situation is “not new news” but an issue which has been decades in the making.
“This has been signalled for a long, long period of time and successive governments have sat by and not addressed the gaps between the supply and the demand that occurs in nursing and now with something like Covid or the flu season kicks in, we’re really seeing the outworking of this.”
READ MORE: Govt partnering with Shortland Street to promote nursing
He said even without the pressures of Covid-19 on the system, the nursing shortage “is going to continue past that period”.
“What we’re looking for is where are the medium and long-term fixes as well as the short-term fixes that [Little] announced yesterday?
"New Zealand has to produce its own nurses. We can't rely on going overseas to plug up the gaps, as has happened in the past ... The Minister mentions 200 more nurses coming through in that return to nursing - that's just a drop in the bucket. That's the test - what is going to happen to attract more nurses, keep them in the profession and provide good jobs at the end of the day.
"While it's a welcome start, there's a lot more to be done. The minister signals that, and we look forward to that engagement."
The president of the New Zealand Royal College of GPs, Dr Samantha Murton told Breakfast the potential number of new GPs coming in from overseas is “probably small compared to what we need”, calling it a “stop gap measure”.
“We do need to make sure that we’re growing our own in the GP sector as well as the nursing sector," she said.
“This is a first step and there needs to be a lot more work to follow.”
Murton said there needs to be more healthcare workers "across the board" working with the community, as well as retaining doctors considering retirement.
“It means that they are valued for what skills and knowledge that they have and then they feel that they can actually continue to work in their area, even if they’re working in a different sort of way with teaching new people coming through because that’s important to keep staff in the community.”
Murton said she would like to see further training carried out in the community, an increase in the number of medical students and more support for doctors to be “on a level playing field” with doctors working in hospitals so “financially, they don’t have to take a hit when they come out into the community to work as a general practitioner”.
Goulter said the “whole question of immigration needs to be fixed”.
“We can’t understand at all why nurses aren’t green listed the same as doctors. That’s an easy policy fix that could happen pretty much overnight but the long-term solutions lie around terms and conditions of employment for those nurses in New Zealand," he said.
“We need to get on top of that really quickly.”
Allan, meanwhile, called for an "equitable distribution of the workforce into the rural areas”.
“They are really suffering and we need to make sure that they are properly staffed in an equitable way.”
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