Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall and MP for Whanganui Steph Lewis take a stroll down Victoria Avenue. Photo/ Bevan Conley
Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall says Whanganui Hospital needs to find a way to address capacity issues.
It was revealed last week that over-occupancy at Whanganui’s emergency department was as high as 147 per cent this winter.
“It’s never desirable to have people waiting and by setting the acute demand, or winter priority for the hospital, I expect all of our hospitals to be working on addressing that,” Verrall said.
Verrall said it took coordination across the whole hospital and could not be fixed by just the emergency department.
“That actually is a project for the whole hospital, to allow people from the emergency department to move through because that’s usually the main pressure is finding a bed for them on the ward.
“People are getting treated in a timely way, but they’re having to wait there and be uncomfortable in the emergency department, and they’d ideally be in bed on a ward which is much more suitable.”
Whilst in Whanganui on Friday Verrall met with Labour MP Steph Lewis and spoke to members of a youth alcohol and other drug service.
She also visited Air Whanganui to view their air ambulance service.
Verrall said she had discussed early discharges from hospitals with staff members.
Earlier this year the Chronicle reported a Whanganui woman who was discharged in the middle of the night without support.
“We did discuss this during my visit to the hospital. It sounds like there are particular challenges around discharging some people who have complex needs from hospital,” she said.
“There are things that hospitals can do to improve that, and I’d expect that that be done.”
She said home visits from specialists could offer a way to discharge someone early, but it always had to be with the caveat that it was a “medically safe discharge”.
“That’s always been the case, that it requires a careful judgement from clinicians.”
Verrall said nationally the reopening of immigration in the middle of last year had been a huge help to staffing issues.
“In the last quarter alone we’ve had 3000 new nursing registrations.
“Also increases in doctors and allied staff as well, that is providing tremendous relief across the country.
“In your emergency department, I think the report there was that they were making steady progress with identifying candidates and having them come through.”
She said for the last 30 years New Zealand had not trained the medical staff it needed.
“The pandemic showed that we needed to shift from that because immigration was interrupted.”
Verrall said to address the rural workforce shortage, the healthcare system had to support rural or provincial hospitals and there also needed to be local collaboration outside of the hospitals.
“I’m thinking of things like jobs for their partners and things like that, they’re often the thing that makes a difference between a doctor moving to a provincial centre or not.”
Vacancies were coming down as immigration grew and more nurses and doctors came through, she said.
“Parts of Whanganui Hospital have just gone through a process where they identify the number of vacancies they need, in order to make more sustainable workloads for nursing staff.
“Naturally when you go through that process of fairly assessing what you need, then you are going to have gaps and they will need to be filled.
“If we focus on vacancies you don’t get the true picture and, of course, the number of nurses in our system has grown.”
She said under the DHB system the funding was disadvantageous to small and provincial hospitals, as they didn’t have the economies of scale that metropolitan centres did.
“As a result, they tend to only be able to afford to pay the specialists what’s in the meca [Multi Employer Collective Agreement], whereas metropolitan centres can afford to pay well above that.
“One of our goals through the health reforms is to address that.”
Eva de Jong is a reporter for the Whanganui Chronicle covering health stories and general news. She began as a reporter in 2023.