The National Party has predictably said it is too little, too late, as if the whole workforce shortage problem has occurred in the last few years under Labour. Both National and Labour-led governments share responsibility for not properly addressing this issue for decades.
It might seem odd to welcome a report highlighting the fact the country is short of more than 8000 medical professionals, but while we have known there are shortages nearly everywhere you look, establishing just how many extra people we might need has been less straightforward.
Under the 20 district health board system there was variance in how information on shortages were gathered, and how accurate such information was.
The figures might be confronting, as Health Minister Ayesha Verrall says, but without a reasonable grasp on the extent of the problem, the risk is any approach to address it becomes whack-a-mole.
A problem decades in the making cannot be solved overnight: the plan estimates it will take at least a decade to address all shortages and pressures across all professions. This takes account of training time and the limits on the ability to increase overseas-trained professionals in the face of a global health worker shortage.
We have had the highest proportion of foreign-trained nurses and the second highest of foreign-trained doctors in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
Since the borders reopened after Covid-19, gaps in the workforce are mostly being filled from overseas. In nursing, for instance, about 6000 of the around 8000 new nurse registrations last year were from overseas.
News this week suggesting the end of the long-running nurses’ pay dispute may be in sight may help with the retention of our home-grown nurses.
The 30,000 Te Whatu Ora Health NZ (HNZ) nurses covered have yet to vote on the offer, but the Government has boosted its pay equity offer by $1.5 billion after the deal it thought it had last year came unstuck over backpay.
If the nurses vote for the deal, there is already concern the new pay rates will encourage more lower paid nurses in the private aged-care sector to jump ship to HNZ. Bed numbers have been declining, despite the increased demand expected from an ageing population, and it is hard to see how this can be resolved without more government funding.
Details on all initiatives in the workforce plan are lacking. These include increasing "earn-as-you-learn" programmes across health professions, something which seems long overdue if the number of students completing training is to be increased.
It also sends a message to trainees they are valued from the get-go.
The plan refers to the need to move to models of care which use the workforce better and provide greater job satisfaction. Interprofessional teams, according to the plan, "can be more resilient and adaptive to changing needs of whānau, technology and service delivery models".
"Interprofessional working, and practice will become an increasing feature of work in health — with greater expectation on professionals across disciplines working together in service delivery teams to make best use of skills and resources to support whānau care. This includes growing new healthcare workforces to meet the diverse needs of our communities."
If this is truly what the Government believes, it needs stop penny-pinching over the proposed interprofessional learning centre (ILC) originally planned for the new Dunedin hospital’s health precinct.
