A nurse.
Photo: 123RF

Angry nurses accuse Health New Zealand of putting cost-cutting ahead of patient safety with its proposal to park a critical staff safety protocol.

The care capacity demand management system calculates the number of nurses needed in each area based on how sick patients are and how much care they need.

Health New Zealand said it was considering “a break” of the system while it considered ways to make the system more “consistent”.

However, a National Nurses Organization delegate, Nathan Clark, said it would amount to “a pause on patient safety”.

“Is the next step to completely abandon what we use as a basis for safe staffing and our safe staffing measurables?

“Is this the treacherous line we’re going down?

“What are we using as a benchmark for patient safety?”

Clark, who is based at the Hutt Hospital, said patients were already experiencing the impact of reduced staff every day in almost every department in every hospital.

“They see good people, great people, struggling to do their jobs in an under-resourced and broken system.”

The New Zealand workforce report last year showed the health system had no more than 4000 nurses.

In response, it hired more than 2,000 – but the cost was later blamed for the cause of its financial problems, with management saying recruitment “went over budget”.

Nurses Organization chief executive Paul Goulter said his members were “alarmed” that Te Whatu Ora was proposing to discontinue the care capacity demand management system.

“It’s a needs-based system that they don’t have the budget to deal with. So you get this binary between our health care system about needs that need to be met or costs that need to be capped?

“And the costs that need to be capped are winning at this point.”

In a written statement to RNZ Health New Zealand / Te Whatu Ora spokesperson Mark Shepherd – its deputy chief executive for the Northern Region – said the aim is to provide “consistent, high quality care within available resources and to ensure the safety of staff and patients”. .

“We are not discontinuing the CCDM program, but rather we are considering discontinuing the CCDM FTE calculation while we undertake quality improvement processes,” he said.

“No final decisions have been made and we will continue to discuss these issues with the labor unions where we use CCDM.”

Meanwhile, NZNO members – nurses, midwives and medical assistants – began a series of 62 one-hour stoppage meetings on Monday, which will end on Friday.

At the top of the agenda is Te Whatu Ora’s intention to suspend calculations for the CCDM secure employment program during collective bargaining late last month, with the employer limiting bargaining parameters to 1% of total employee costs.