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The man in a suit

This author of this short story is Tina Hansen, a passionate NZNO member who works in the aged care sector.

Man in a suit

The old man, looking out his rest home hospital bedroom door saw a nurse’s uniform walk by.
‘What!?’ he thought.
Soon another uniform walked by, this time he noticed the uniform had legs and arms attached but no head.
‘What the hell is going on?’ he wondered, ‘nurses with no heads?!’

He rang his bell and no one came.
‘Bugger this’, he thought and rang his bell again and again.
‘%$#@’ he thought.

Eventually a man in a suit arrived.
“What can I do for you?” the man in a suit asked.
“I have rung the bell but no nurse appears” he said.
The man in a suit frowned and asked if he could help.
“Oh no, I need a nurse” said the man “and all I have seen is uniforms with arms and legs walking past – no heads.”
“This is not right” said the man in a suit.

He went looking for nurses; sure enough all he found was uniforms with arms and legs.
The man in a suit rang the police.
“Something has happened to my nurses, they are walking around with no heads.”
“We will be right there.” the police chief said, “We can’t have nurses with no heads.”

The police chief arrived with some other police officers and searched the building for evidence. After a short time they found a room with nurses’ heads piled up and with unfinished documentation everywhere. The police were left in no doubt as to who the heads belonged to.

A meeting with the man in a suit and the police chief exposed the information. The man in a suit had told the nurses if they didn’t get all their work done, heads would roll.

There were not enough nurses and not enough time in the day for them to care for their patients and do their paperwork. And that wasn’t good enough for the man in the suit.

Their heads rolled, leaving headless nurses, useful for nothing.

The man in a suit was arrested for the dismemberment of the nurses’ bodies, spirits and souls.

 

 


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MECA reflection

IMG_0313Jemma Irvine is an NZNO delegate at Wellington Hospital. She reflects on what the DHB MECA means to her.

I became an NZNO delegate last year and I attended the MECA training day in February 2015.

Can I just say, I am soooooo grateful for all the nurses who have fought hard for their rights up until now.

Some of the other nurses in the group were sharing their stories of what it has been like nursing in New Zealand over the past 20+ years. It sounds like they have had some pretty big ups and downs. Some nurses were talking about when their hospital board decided to dissolve all of their jobs and make them reapply for their positions. Some nurses weren’t rehired. Some were hired back as team leaders instead of Charge Nurse Managers and therefore on a lower wage. I couldn’t quite believe that this could happen!

Budget cuts affect everyone, but nurses often carry a higher portion of the impact. They work hard to try to do the same amount of work with less staff and fewer resources – always thinking of their patients before themselves. Over time this takes its toll. It’s not sustainable to always be working beyond your means. Something has got to give.

At one point there became the need to strike. These nurses talked about what it was like to strike. They shared the emotional impact, the feelings of guilt when standing on the picket line knowing their patients were still inside. It was not an action taken lightly. All of them said it was hard and they would not have done it if they felt that they could have kept going the way things were. I admired them so much for making a stand to improve their working conditions and fight to be able to give patient’s the care they deserve.

I know strikes are difficult for everyone, but I really appreciate being able to benefit from the hard work these brave people have put in to improve conditions for all of us; nurses, midwives, health care assistants and, most of all, patients.

Hearing some of these powerful stories made me so proud to be a nurse and I feel very privileged to start nursing in this current work environment. I am so grateful for our DHB MECA that means our conditions are able to be protected and we are treated (for the most part) fairly.

I know we are going to have to stand up to keep our working conditions in the near future as the DHB and NZNO try to come to and agreement about our MECA. I want to take this opportunity to thank the ‘oldies’ (meant in the most respectful way possible!) who have paved a lot of the way for us.

Thanks so much!

Love from a grateful, inspired young nurse.


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What does the DHB MECA mean to me?

20150310_154113Kimberley McAuley is an NZNO delegate at Waikato Hospital. She was asked to speak at the event held there yesterday celebrating 10 years of the DHB MECA. This is her speech. We think it’s fantastic!

To be truly honest with each of you present today, when I was first asked to present a small talk on what the MECA means to me, at the birthday party celebration of the 10th anniversary of the MECA, I was a little taken back because: a) public speaking is not one of my strongest points, and b) I was actually going to have to really contemplate and reflect on this question.

Firstly, before I let you in on what ‘the MECA means to me’, I will introduce myself to you all. My name is Kimberley McAuley. I am a registered nurse, I work in the main operating theatres for Waikato District Health Board and I am an NZNO delegate for my workplace and have been for the past 6 months.  I have been a registered nurse for only three years, so less time than the MECA itself has actually existed.

To be quite frank, for my first two years of practice as a registered nurse, or at least the first year anyway, I had no idea what the MECA was about, let alone what it meant it me. I’m not actually sure if I knew the MECA even existed. However, over the past year I have really come to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation surrounding the MECA and the value that the MECA has not only for nurses, but additionally for our HCA and midwife colleagues as well.

For me personally, the major underpinning of the DHB MECA is the element of unity. The MECA is what holds us all, as nurses, together. The MECA works to ensure that we, as nurses, are ALL looked after.  The MECA ensures that we have decent pay, and decent conditions of work. The MECA ensures that we, and all nurses in DHBs throughout New Zealand, work under the same terms and conditions.

Personally, I can vouch and admit that at times, I don’t feel that I get the salary that I deserve when I think about the hard work that I invest into my role as a theatre nurse; the extra hours that I do, and the heart, soul, dedication and passion that I put into my tasks and responsibilities on an everyday basis. I can additionally vouch for the fact that often, and very often of late, feel that I do not have adequate conditions in my workplace. However, without this unifying MECA that we all belong to, I believe all of our workplaces and related factors to our workplaces would be a lot worse of without our MECA. This multi-employer collective agreement, in my eyes is the glue that sticks us all together, and what unifies us all.

So, to conclude, I would just like to say a big happy birthday to our MECA and long may it prevail and be there for us!

 


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Care rationing a sad reality

Care rationing web headerNZNO believes every patient has the right to receive quality care, every shift, every day. Nurses, midwives and health-care assistants also have the right to work in safe, supportive environments and be enabled to provide quality care.

The Safe staffing healthy workplaces unit defines care rationing as: “Any occasion when an aspect of a patient’s required care is either missed altogether, unduly delayed, performed to a suboptimal standard or inappropriately delegated to someone not qualified to perform the activity.”

Is care rationing the “new normal” in patient care?  Are failing to take observations and administer medications on time, inability to turn bedridden patients two hourly, skipping hygiene cares, inability to mobilise patients  regularly, failing to provide comprehensive patient education, not answering call bells, all too familiar aspects of too many nurses’ shifts, too often?

Care rationing is unacceptable because it means patients do not receive all the care they require, it exposes patients to unacceptable risks, it can have serious consequences, it increases patient morbidity and mortality, and contravenes people’s rights to health services of an appropriate standard.

Drawing on national and international research, NZNO’s newly-released position statement attributes care rationing to a systems failure due to inadequate staffing or inappropriate skill mix or insufficient time or a combination of these factors.

The position statement was developed to articulate that care rationing is a systems failure, not a failure of individual nurses. We have chosen the term ‘care rationing’ because terms such as ‘missed care’ or ‘care left undone’ imply that an individual nurse is to blame.

Care rationing is not just another form of prioritisation. Prioritisation occurs at the start of a shift when nurses consider the work that has to be done over their shift and what needs to be done first. Care rationing happens in a chaotic way when there are simply not enough staff to do the work and nurses have no control over the situation.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. NZNO has a plan to eliminate care rationing. What we need is:

  • increased funding for DHBs;
  • nursing care made a priority in decision-making;
  • nursing seen as an investment, not a cost;
  • patient-centred models of care;
  • a focus on early intervention and prevention, and nurses working to the full extent of their scope;
  • full implementation of the care capacity demand management programme in all DHBs;
  • effective workforce planning;
  • transparency about staffing levels;
  • funding to address its cultural impacts;
  • immediate action when staffing requirements are not met to ensure patients get the care they need; and
  • patients who are empowered to complain when their needs are not met because of inadequate staffing.

To find out more about care rationing and what NZNO is doing to eliminate it, go to www.nzno.org.nz/carerationing

 

This blog post was developed from an article first published in Kai Taiki Nursing NZ, vol 20, no 6, July 2014.