LabPlus offered $50,000 pay rises

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

Some pathologists at the troubled LabPlus laboratory were given $50,000 pay rises in a bid to avert a staffing crisis.

Three of the nine pathologists in the department that checks tissue and cell samples for diseases including cancer resigned last year and only one replacement was found.

In an attempt to stem the flow of staff from New Zealand's top medical laboratory, the Auckland District Health Board offered the "supplementary payments" to anatomical pathologists, lifting their annual pay to around $195,000, in November.

The offer was made after the original three pathologists resigned.

Pathologists at some public hospitals and in the private sector commonly earn $180,000 a year. There is an international shortage of pathologists and the pay boost at LabPlus was also designed to attract new staff.

It is understood that the only string attached to existing staff receiving the supplementary payment, offered in November, was to keep working at the lab.

The payment has angered LabPlus departments in which staff were not offered the sweetener and has worsened already poor staff-management relations.

"The whole lab is rotten right through," an insider said.

LabPlus failed an inspection last month and lost its accreditation for two sections, chemical pathology and virology-immunology.

In a damning report, International Accreditation New Zealand (IANZ) said LabPlus was taking up to 10 times longer to return urgent tests than the hospital labs it replaced.

LabPlus, which opened on December 1, had no staff training or competence records, and had been subjecting some staff to high levels of formaldehyde, said IANZ.

The source told the Herald that the board's lab staff had long lacked confidence in the laboratory management, but had restated this because of the latest problems.

The new, $20 million laboratory - part of the $420 million redevelopment of hospitals at the Auckland Hospital site in Grafton - had been designed poorly.

"That has added to some of the delays in getting specimens processed. In some of the labs the whole layout of the lab is so bad there's no proper flow of specimens."

Staff concerns had been ignored during the design phase for the three-level building, the source said.

But the health board rejected the claims yesterday, saying LabPlus met architects' best-practice standards.

"LabPlus staff members were actively involved with the design through a staff-focused user group process, and liaised with the project manager and construction team."

Commenting on the area which caused the most concern to IANZ - specimens picked up and delivered at a rate up to 10 times longer than before - the board said: "No one expressed concerns about the specimen delivery area at any stage of the design process."

The executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, Ian Powell, said the $50,000 payment was an understandable reaction to a crisis but would create tensions with other staff.