Tauranga nurses joined many across the country striking for pay parity against their hospital colleagues at the start of September. Photos / File
Tauranga nurses joined many across the country striking for pay parity against their hospital colleagues at the start of September. Photos / File
Primary health care nurses across the Bay of Plenty "frustratingly" held their second stopwork meeting this week
after failed negotiations for pay parity with their district health board colleagues.
For two hours, primary health care nurses, who are members of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, walked off the job, instead holding a meeting about their next step after a national strike on September 3.
Doctors Tauranga nurse practitioner Maria Costelloe said members were frustrated.
However, she said it was hard to focus on whom to pressure as the Ministry of Health believed it had nothing to do with them.
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Health Minister Chris Hipkins. Photo / Andrew Warner
Minister of Health Chris Hipkins was quoted at a Covid-19 press conference last month as saying he was not going to get involved in industrial negotiations.
"Ultimately they are employed by private practices, the Government is not their employer and so there is a variety of factors that those employers take into account in their negotiations.
"In general, the Government supports pay parity. Equal pay for equal work, that's the basic premise that we do support. Having said that in primary care, we are not the employer of those nurses."
"Our funding comes from the DHB, the DHB gets funding from the government. The Government will intervene when they need to intervene.
"We're essential but we're not counted as essential but we are the ones on the frontline."
The action comes more than a year after failed negotiations between primary healthcare nurses and the government. Nurses say they are paid 10.6 per cent less than their health board colleagues but hold the same qualifications, skills and experience.
These nurses are covered by the primary healthcare multi-employer collective agreement.
Primary Health Care nurses are being paid 10.6 per cent less than their DHB counterparts. Photo / File
Health board nurses won a pay rise in 2018 after industrial action, but primary health care nurses - those at GPs and some emergency clinics - say they're still being paid about $7650 less per year.
Health board nurses can be paid up to $77,300. Salaries in primary care top out at about $69,700, the New Zealand Nurses Organisation confirmed.
The stopwork meetings were planned as either a report back from resumed negotiations or to discuss and confirm next steps if no progress had been made.
Costelloe believed more partial withdrawal of labour would make stakeholders listen.
"We are general specialists. You can be a registered nurse but you can't suddenly work in general practice without further training for vaccination or cervical screening," Costelloe said.
"We have to know everything about everything.
"We just want to be paid fairly for the speciality that we are."
Primary health care nurses believe they should be paid to recognise the work, such as Covid-19 testing. Photo / Getty Images
Gemma Goddard has just recently made the move from the health board to general practice and although working closely with patients is more rewarding than in the hospital, she wished the toll it took would be recognised.
"I'm blown away how specialised things are. You're not getting paid any extra for worrying or educating yourself about all this, so there are no benefits.
"The public really doesn't know what we do and that we have to be critically thinking all the time."
The Ministry of Health said it was not appropriate for it to comment on the wage rates agreed between employees and their employers.
"Over the next six months, the ministry and DHBs will be working together to better understand non-DHB employed nurses' employment conditions, including salary.
"The ministry acknowledges that nurses employed by organisations in primary care, aged residential care, iwi-based health care services and other community settings are often not paid as much as nurses employed by DHBs. This issue is wider than just affecting primary health care nursing."
The ministry could not answer further questions before deadline. TAS, representative of the 20 DHB's passed the request for comment to the ministry.
What is a stop-work meeting?
Under the Employment Relations Act, unions are permitted two stopwork meetings a year in any workplace, where members may attend to discuss matters relating to their
