Anne Daniels, President
NZNO Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa

Late in 2023 NZNO CE Paul Goulter outlined NZNO’s priorities for 2024. First and foremost is achieving Pay Parity for nurses working outside of Te Whatu Ora. Consequently, on 8 December NZNO raised a Pay Equity claim for Primary Health Care members involving more than 500 employers. We are standing up and fighting the roadblocks in our way.

Heading into 2024, the NZNO Board has prioritised member health and safety. Paul Goulter recently said, “We need to ensure that nurses and health care workers work in safe workplaces and that they are unafraid to press for their rights.” Specifically, we will be standing up and fighting for our right to safe staffing through legislated nurse-to-patient ratios underpinned by CCDM.

Health and safety is everyone’s business, including Government, employer and employee. The Government’s job is to provide legislation and policy. A guiding principle of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 is that workers and others need to be given the highest level of protection possible from workplace risks.

Employers and employees need to uphold legislation and standards in practice. The employer must engage with the workers and enable them to identify and manage risks (physical or mental) in the workplace. Employers must “ensure there are sufficient health care and support workers on duty at all times to provide culturally and clinically safe services” (Health and Disability services (safety) standard 2.3.1). But we all know that is not happening.

Research tells us that appropriate levels of nurse staffing is critical to patient safety. The CCDM system matches staff resources to patient care need supporting a better working environment but is yet to be fully funded or implemented after 20 years of asking.

The lack of Government or employer commitment is telling – every time a nurse writes an unsafe staffing incident report. My request to Te Whatu Ora and the Ministry of Health to provide numbers around reports of unsafe staffing over the last five years was declined because “it would take too long and too much resource” to provide me with an answer.

Te Whatu Ora is required to “follow the National Adverse Event Reporting Policy for internal and external reporting… to reduce preventable harm (HDSS 2.2.4). Therefore, Te Whatu Ora and the government are legally required to resource data collection and reporting. We will not let this go.

Health and safety representatives (HSRs) around the country have consistently reported unsafe staffing, met with managers and escalated their concerns. HSRs have submitted increasing numbers of Provisional Notices of Improvement to WorkSafe over the last three years but an external review found there are “some instances of known harm where WorkSafe appears to be taking little or no intervention” (Pennington, 2023). This is why we need nurse patient ratio legislation to fund and implement safe staffing (and CCDM) across the whole health sector.

Meanwhile HSRs are making a difference. In December 2023 alone, the Waikato District Nursing Service used health and safety process to gain an increase of eight RN FTE. The HSR said that after asking for years “the Executive now knows we mean business”.

Wellington ED HSRs working with the CCDM facilitator, identified a gap of 67 FTE through Trendcare data. Health and safety caught the attention of media repeatedly through actions taken by member HSRs, e.g. Auckland (Nico Woodward), Gisborne (Christine Warrender), Waikato (Janferie Dewar) where there are chronic failures to safely staff workplaces.

2024 will see us all “Get up, stand up. Stand up for our rights!” (Bob Marley and the Wailers).