Health Minister Andrew Little, right, at the opening of a new ICU ward in Christchurch Hospital in May. Photo / George Heard, File
Health Minister Andrew Little, right, at the opening of a new ICU ward in Christchurch Hospital in May. Photo / George Heard, File
Opinion by Andrew Little
OPINION
Kathy Spencer (NZ Herald, December 5) has a point when she writes something should have been done about the health workforce years ago.
It’s a problem that goes back decades. Training medical staff takes years, and successive governments share the blame for not recruiting and training thepeople we were always going to need to care for a growing and ageing population.
I would be interested to hear Spencer’s views on why greater efforts weren’t made during the time she was a senior adviser to National’s Bill English when he was the Minister of Health, and then more recently when she was the deputy director-general of health in charge of workforce.
There is some irony in hearing criticisms coming from someone who was a key part of the system at the time the groundwork should have been laid for a problem that, as she rightly points out, this Government has inherited.
But speculating about what forces were at work in the past doesn’t change the present. I have to deal with the world as it is, not as it might have been.
There are two parts to our current problem. One is the immediate staff shortage, which has been highlighted and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and one of the worst flu seasons in memory.
And then there’s the long-term fix, so we don’t get into this position again.
You can’t magic-up skilled health workers. You have to train them (which we are doing, but it takes time) or they have to come from somewhere else. And every other country is competing for them too. The World Health Organisation says that globally, we’re likely to be short by 10 million health workers by 2030, and all the foreign health ministers I talk to say they are facing the same problems we are.
That doesn’t mean New Zealand isn’t offering a good deal for international health workers. During the Covid-19 pandemic, about 5000 came to work here despite severe travel restrictions, and now that the borders are open again, we’ve changed our immigration rules to make it easier for health workers to come here. Nursing Council figures show that over the past 12 months, more than 4000 overseas-qualified nurses have registered to work in New Zealand.
Andrew Little. Photo / Mark Mitchell
We’ve got a whole lot of other things under way too, including a one-stop recruitment desk for overseas health workers interested in coming here, and big subsidies to help them get registered to work.
There will always be a place in our health system for people from other places, and for New Zealanders to go overseas to work. The exchange of ideas and experience alone is a huge benefit to us all.
But as the Covid-19 pandemic showed, we can’t keep relying on immigration to staff our hospital wards and doctors’ surgeries. We’ve got to look at the bigger, long-term problem, the one that previous governments failed to tackle.
We’re already doing a lot of practical things. We’re training more nurses and GPs than ever before.
We’re lifting pay rates. Nurses’ pay has gone up 20 per cent since we became the government and we’re setting aside half a billion dollars a year to address their pay-equity claim. We’re paying trainee GPs more to make it a career that’s as financially attractive as being a hospital doctor, and we changed the law so some of the traditionally female parts of the health workforce can be paid fairly.
And we’re rebuilding our public hospitals, many of which had had no money spent on them in years and were falling apart.
A North Shore Hospital wing under construction is the biggest expansion project since the main tower block was built in the early 1980s. Photo /Michael Craig
We’re also, for the first time, developing a national health workforce strategy to make sure we’ve got the workforce we are going to need in the future.
It sounds crazy but, until we brought the health system together under one umbrella this year, our public hospitals were actually competing with each other for staff. Spencer is critical of our reforms (perhaps understandable, as she was so involved in setting up the old system), but we had to clear away the layers of bureaucracy and duplication to get to the real problems and solutions.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers. Nearly a quarter of a million people work in our health sector, and I’m listening to them and working with them.
Last month, I met in Parliament more than 200 health representatives from across the country – frontline health workers, employers, professional bodies and educational institutions. It’s their insights and ideas and professional expertise we’re drawing on as we tackle decades-old problems in the health system, including the workforce shortage.
What the Government brings to the table is the commitment that this time, the problems will be properly solved.
