Time to value our nurses
Public sector: There’s often not enough staff to do the job properly
Just-in-time ordering is a common strategy in the business world. Keeping stock, materials and parts to an absolute minimum reduces, firstly, the need for storage space. And, secondly, reduces the potential for waste from ordering stock or materials that aren’t used due to changing industry requirements, deterioration or obsolescence.
Efficiencies are fine-tuned by computer technology that logs precise numbers of products and tracks their location from factory to factory, business to business. An army of IT workers plots the network of supply lines in today’s globalised economy.
Operating normally, this complex system is lean and economically efficient.
Related to just-in-time ordering is another business strategy many of us will have experienced, just-in-time staffing. The same precise, computeraided management of materials and parts can be used on people.
Just as it pays for a business to keep stock inventories lean, it also pays to keep staffing levels lean. Having contracted workers rather than permanent staff for some tasks allows a business to turn the labour supply on and off. Having people on temporary or part-time contracts is advantageous, too.
Staffing levels are often at the bare minimum. Meaning that most jobs these days are pedal to the floor, with all the stress that entails.
The public sector is no different. Talk to any health worker, teacher, anyone working at the frontline of a government service. They’ll tell you there’s often not enough staff to do the job properly.
When it comes to combating the
Covid threat, I can tolerate the Government’s excuses and justifications for waiting on Covid vaccines to arrive. The logistics of first getting supply, then ensuring storage, safe delivery and matching supply with demand, so vaccines don’t expire is complex. The just-in-time supply model is unavoidable. And there’s a risk of getting it wrong.
But I’ve no toleration for just-intime staffing by the Ministry of Health in the middle of a pandemic. That extra contact tracers — 600 of them — had to be trained and hired after
Delta broke through our border defences was inexcusable.
That they weren’t prepared suggests to me that the public health sector is too much in the grip of justin-time staffing practices. It’s not as if they had to train extra nurses, which takes years.
Saving money on staffing at this time, when capacity has been repeatedly identified as a problem, can only point to a virus of costcutting permeating the minds of health bosses.
Labour in government has simply not done enough to fix undercapacity in the health sector and relieve stressed frontline workers. They’ve had ample time to do so. That there’s a shortage of specialist ICU nurses this far into the Covid crisis is equally hard to accept. Our frontline health workers are doing a wonderful job, but there are grumblings about the stress the health system is under, even without Covid. Remember, the nurses put off strike action because of the Delta outbreak. Nurses had rejected a pay and workload deal brokered between their union leaders and the Government. That’s unusual. It shows how frustrated and angry nurses are. We need to look after our nurses and other health workers. The only answer is to pay our health workers the near equivalent to what they can earn in Australia. The failure to fund our health system adequately, to avoid just-in-time staffing scenarios and shortages, contradicts the Prime Minister’s pleas for kindness.
Labour has the responsibility to change how we manage our health workers. If they act urgently, they might do so in time to avert political damage.
That there’s a shortage of specialist ICU nurses this far into the Covid crisis is equally hard to accept.