The mother of a toddler whose cancer treatment was delayed due to staff shortages at Starship Hospital says often her son was screaming and writhing in pain while they tried to get help from a nurse.
She said she was heartbroken and doubted the health minister's assurances that jobs were being recruited for.
Some chemotherapy and bone marrow treatments have been delayed at the children's hospital for up to seven days due to lack of staff.
Tanya Lapu'aho's two-and-a-half-year-old son Cillian was diagnosed in January with high-risk neuroblastoma.
He's since had multiple stays at Starship for rounds of chemotherapy and two bone marrow transplants, and is moving on to radiation and immunotherapy.
Lapu'aho said timing is everything with cancer treatment - but her son's second bone marrow transplant was delayed at least a week because there were not enough specialist nurses to carry out the treatment.
She said babies were bearing the brunt of delays.
Lapu'aho said her son had been in Starship Hospital many times, with the two longest stays lasting just over a month, and it was obvious that the nursing staff were under a huge amount of pressure.
Initially they thought delays to her son's surgery were for medical reasons, but they were then told it was due to staffing shortages, she said.
"On a day-to-day basis it looked like our son screaming and writhing in pain and us calling for our nurse and her wanting to come straight away but her not being able to because she had too many other things to do - you know duties to carry out, other patients to take care of - to the point where it was taking on average about 20 minutes, half an hour on a really busy day for a nurse to come to the room and respond to you pressing the nurse call button.
"And most of the time we were pressing that button for pain relief because our boy is in so much pain from the cancer, from the chemo, from everything."
She said it was evident that the pain was severe because when they were finally able to get help, her son was put on oxycodone and ketamine.
Lapu'aho's son had to wait for chemotherapy lines to be changed and medication to be administered, and said available nurses would apologise because they were not yet qualified for those tasks.
Once her son's pain medication ran out completely and there was no nurse available to top it up again, she said.
Amid nurse shortages, hospital said it had to move appointments to ensure they could be delivered safely. (Source: 1News)
It took the nurse 24 minutes to come to change the pain pump containing the medicine which had run out, she said.
"Another time it took over half an hour for the nurse to get someone from the pain relief team to come and have a look at upping the dose because it wasn't enough to kill the pain for Cillian.
"He's screaming, we can't put him down, he's writhing, you know, like he's only two years old, the cancer feels like fire inside his bones, it's so unfair that that guilt and responsibility gets put on the nurses, you know they keep apologising 'I'm so sorry, we're just so short staffed' and we know it's not their problem and we feel horrible that they even feel that it is."
She said it was obvious that there were not enough nurses to do the work.
"When you take a step out of your hospital room and look at the ward, there's just not that many nurses, and the ones that are there, they're running around working as hard as they can, and it just feels like a hopeless and helpless situation, really."
Despite the fact that her son had a very high-risk diagnosis, he is now in complete remission, "and that's only thanks to the amazing medical professionals that we have access to at Starship Hospital, it's so unfair what's happening to them," she said.
Lapu'aho said staff were overworked and under-resourced, and a charge nurse had told her there was a hiring freeze.
Health Minister Simeon Brown insisted all eight vacant paediatric haematology/oncology roles had been filled or recruited for.
Health NZ has since confirmed it would be three months before the ward was fully staffed, with seven nurses due to start over that period.
A spokesperson in Brown's office denied any hiring freeze and said the vacancies were the result of natural attrition such as parental leave and retirement.
But Lapu'aho said those could be planned for months in advance.
She said it was tough trying to advocate for her child because there was nothing the nurses themselves could do about the shortage.
Other parents were scared about complaining because they did not want to risk receiving poor care, Lapu'aho said.
Nurses Organisation says better workforce planning needed
Nurses Organisation Kaiwhakahaere Kerri Nuku told Morning Report the situation was not a surprise as there had been nursing workforce shortages for years.
"We have known that this ward has been understaffed for months, we should have had strategies in place long before we were needing to compromise the care of young children."
There may be activity now to recruit because of the staffing crisis, but it should never have been that way, she said.
The Tertiary Education Commission has told organisations to limit the number of nurses it trains next year due to a shortage of student nursing placement spots.
"It's all about workforce and evolving around the workforce planning," she said.
"This is not the solution to reduce the amount of nurses that you are putting through because we certainly are having shortages in the workforce already. What it does mean potentially is that we look to internationally qualified nurses... to fill gaps as experienced nurses."
New Zealand should be training recruiting and its own domestic supply of nurses and having to recruit overseas once again indicated a failure of planning, she said.
She said there should be enough room for the increased number of nursing enrolments and the required placements.
"If we had a fully functioning system that is well staffed then absolutely we should be able to accommodate the students and their experience for placements.
"To take this approach is absolutely crazy."
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