When the country is crying out for health professionals of all types in the face of a global shortage, and there is recognition in the long-term growing more of our own clinicians is the way to go, how does this make sense?
Both of our medical schools have been keen to increase their intakes, but despite raising this with the previous health minister Andrew Little last year, no funding was allocated for this in this year’s Budget.
We presume neither of the schools made the suggestion without recognising that for this to be successful there would need to be suitable clinical supervision for students.
The Government set up a health workforce taskforce last year to work on a long-term plan to address workforce pressures. Given the length of time it takes to train doctors, it would seem sensible for decisions on boosting medical school intakes to have been made early in the planning, but this has not happened.
As well as the current medical schools’ call for increased intakes, clamour for a third medical school in Hamilton is rearing its head again after the failure of a 2016 bid.
Whether it will get any more political traction this election cycle remains to be seen.
The National Party is playing its usual game of criticising Labour for not doing anything but keeping its cards close to its chest about what it would do should it be in government.
Also baffling this week was Te Whatu Ora seeking an injunction in the Employment Court to stop yesterday’s hour-long strike by nurses at Gisborne Hospital’s acute care unit.
One referred to saying to her husband when going home ‘‘no-one died today. I don’t think I made a mistake’’.
This was no flash in the pan scenario. Concerns were identified as early as last August but nurses were dissatisfied with attempts to address the issues. The hospital considered its approach to manage demand was the best it could do while further staff were being sought.
Te Whatu Ora argued the strike was unlawful because the nurses did not have reasonable grounds for believing it was justified on health and safety grounds.
Judge Kerry Smith was not convinced by arguments other staff would have to be diverted to the ward during the strike. Effectively that was already happening to meet demand, and in any case, the hospital had 14 days to make contingency plans.
Judge Smith said the best that might be said for Te Whatu Ora’s legal argument was that it was weak.
He did not consider it appropriate to interpret the law to prevent the employees from withdrawing their labour on grounds of concerns about health and safety simply because immediate and lasting change could not be made promptly as a result of the industrial action. Such an approach would deprive parties such as the nurses of an opportunity to draw attention to unsafe and unhealthy conditions.
Although there was an element of symbolism in the nurses’ decision to strike because there would not be an immediate fix to the problems, the judge found it was in the overall interests of justice to allow the strike to go ahead.
This sort of brinkmanship being practised by Te Whatu Ora over industrial relations was all too common in the district health boards’ era and should have been left there, as we have pointed out before.
How did it make sense for Te Whatu Ora to take this action? All it did was waste taxpayers’ money, draw more attention to the inability of the hospital to fully address the nurses’ concerns and risk further souring of relationships with the nurses. A sensible risk analysis could have worked that out in advance.
