Staff employed by Otaihape Health Ltd are calling for a statutory manager to take over running the town's health services.
It follows a meeting last week where union members said they had no faith in the management of the beleaguered health services.
Representatives of OHL and Otaihape Health Trust met with
the Whanganui District Health Board behind closed doors yesterday to discuss the service's critical financial status.
Union members presented a petition to the board before the meeting. They say their members should not be expected to take wage cuts to keep the service operating.
Rob Haultain, industrial adviser for the NZ Nurses Organisation, said her members were aware that WDHB and many other DHBs were trading with huge deficits "but those employers do not and would not ask the staff to subsidise the care of patients by taking wage cuts".
The Nurses Organisation, along with the Public Service Association, Service and Food Workers Union and the midwifery union, have been in employment contract negotiations with OHL since late last month.
Ms Haultain said the members were not prepared to continue bargaining at this stage while other options were looked at to keep the town's health services operational.
She said OHL management had told them the service was in dire financial straits.
Earlier talks about savings had been around staff cuts and reducing the remaining roster hours, she said.
"Union members had asked then whether OHL was able to pay redundancy and had been advised that it wasn't able to. Discussions were then about whether Whanganui District Health Board would be willing to meet the cost of redundancies.
"We advised management that, if WDHB agreed to meet the cost of the redundancies, then it was possible that there would be sufficient volunteers to achieve the staff cuts that management had proposed," Ms Haultain said.
But the unions' position changed when management came up with "an entirely different" cost cutting claim which, she said, included "very drastic cuts" to wages and conditions.
She said some workers would be faced with up to a 30 per cent reduction in their take-home pay.
"We were advised that they [OHL] would not trade on beyond July 27 this year unless we agreed to accept the employer's cuts to wages and conditions," Ms Haultain said. She said OHL's financial statements for 2007/08 and 2008/09 showed there had been "very significant" increases in a number of expenses.
For example, administration expenses, increased from $104,484 the first year to $496,163 the following year, she said.
The total liabilities of the business had increased from $380,000 to more than $1 million in the same period.
"Our members, along with many in Taihape community, have concerns about what caused these expenses and liabilities to almost treble in just one year."
Ms Haultain said that in September 2007, $129,732.62 was transferred to the OHL account from WDHB, which represented the accrued annual leave entitlements of the current OHL staff who had transferred from WDHB.
"We asked where this sum was in the financial statements [but] management could not tell us.
"Management also could not tell us when or on what that $129,732.62 had be spent," she said.
Ms Haultain said the unions had lost faith and did not believe the management had the necessary skills or capacity to run Taihape's health services "in a financially prudent, coherent and sustainable way".
For that reason the unions were unwilling to accept any cuts to their terms and conditions.
TAIHAPE'S PLEA: SAVE OUR HEALTH SERVICES
Early in 2008 Angelique Tucker stood up in front of the Whanganui District Health Board and asked for its leadership in ensuring Taihape's health services remained strong and vibrant.
Yesterday she was there again, speaking on behalf of staff who say they are distressed the board and Otaihape Health Trust "have seen fit to ask us to subsidise health services by taking massive cuts" to the terms and conditions of employment.
Contract negotiations between unions, the trust and Otaihape Health Ltd have broken down amid acrimony (see lead story).
"We have no confidence in the current management of the business," Ms Tucker told the board.
"We don't believe the current management are capable of running an effective, efficient, sustainable health service for the people of Taihape."
She said the petitioners were asking the board to dismiss the trust board and install an independent manager.
"We pledge to work with such a manager to explore all avenues to maintaining the strong, vibrant rural health service that we've previously asked the board to support," Ms Tucker said.
