In a two-part series, 1News' Nicole Bremner talks to health professionals about the state of the sector and how staff shortages are causing chronic burnout.
It’s impossible to know how our understaffed workforce is really coping with official attempts to fix chronic shortages across the sector.
On one hand, the government’s launched a recruitment drive to find quality workers overseas. This includes help with additional training that might be required and ensuring immigration processes are as streamlined as possible.
But on the other hand, recruitment takes time. Checks and balances aside, only some health workers are in a position to immediately leave their countries of origin and move “Down Under”. Senior health professionals with established offshore careers often have family to bring with them and need to time to relocate.
This all adds up to little or even no relief for those on our frontlines and that is about as sad as it gets.
1 News spent two days at Taranaki Base Hospital talking to staff across the hospital.
They told us about the impact the last two years have had on them and the effect of staff shortages.
The second story in the series which aired on 1News at 6pm on Sunday can be watched above
Ongoing talk about our health sector always ends up in the same place.
New Zealand is chronically short of health workers.
Not just a few hundred here and there but chronically short of thousands of much-needed workers.
So what an insight to spend two days at Taranaki Base Hospital last week, seeing firsthand what being short-staffed actually looks like.
Staff at the 200-bed hospital were friendly and welcoming.
They’ve been through a lot since Covid-19 arrived in 2020, it’s been tough.
Many nurses have left - due to overwork, burnout or ongoing stress.
Nicole Bremner got a first-hand look at the high workload on staff. (Source: 1News)
The first story in the series which aired on 1News at 6pm on Thursday night can be viewed above.
Some staff told us they worried things will be missed and patients will suffer.
Others said they worried during the busiest times that the care they offered was "suboptimal".
For health professionals, who pride themselves on providing "gold standard" care, you can see the words suboptimal are painful.
Suboptimal is not who they are and it hurts to say it out loud.
Short staffed
The Emergency Department was understaffed on the first night we filmed there – short of two doctors and two nurses.
Some staff told us they work 12-hour shifts to help cover the shortfalls.
One Registrar said she didn’t want to work extra shifts when she was exhausted. She said it wasn’t safe for her to work when she so was tired, regardless of how much they paid her.
Taranaki Base Hospital employs around 2000 staff and serves a region of 70,000 people.
The last two-and-a-half years have left some staff scarred, as are their counterparts in hospitals around the country.
In the two nights we spent there we saw patients treated for fractures, burns, an overdose and pellet wounds self-inflicted by a man cleaning his slug gun.
Several patients were airlifted to Waikato Hospital for specialised treatment.
Others were patched up and sent home or admitted to a hospital ward.
I left feeling grateful to the people who continue to give so much to help others – to the strangers who arrive at their hospital needing care.
It’s now time New Zealand gave back by increasing the number of health workers we train, doing more to attract the staff we need and being more generous with rates of pay.
If we don’t, this conversation will never end and we’ll all be worse off for it.
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