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Ongoing industrial action by healthcare workers will continue next week as 36,000 nurses, midwives and health care assistants go on strike, calling for safer staffing levels.
The healthcare workers will strike on September 2 and 4, from 7am to 11pm.
During the first round of industrial action on July 30, nurse spokesperson Jean Moor recounted how she had to perform an ECG in a corridor for an 80-year-old patient who had collapsed.
“How’s that safe staffing? I already had my four patients in cubicles and all the corridor patients in an emergency department where anything can happen. It’s not acceptable.”
“We want nurse patient ratios of one to four so we can give better care,” she said.
Nurses from North Shore Hospital who went on strike in the July action protested along Shakespeare Road demanding “safe staffing to give better care to their patients.”
According to Te Whatu Ora data obtained by the New Zealand Nurse Organisation under the Official Information Act, between January and November last year, 50 percent of all day shifts were understaffed across hospital wards in 16 health districts.
“If you don’t have enough nurses to care for the patients, and if I get caught up with dealing with one patient, those other patients don’t get any care. They’ve got nobody looking after them. How are they safe?” Moor said.
“Our waiting list is also growing longer because there aren’t enough nurses to staff theatres,” she added.
A nurse who wished to remain anonymous, said that nurses efforts are inextricably linked to patient outcomes. “Most of us crammed eight hours’ worth of work into two so we could do this strike and make sure our patients got the care they needed.”
Moor who has been a nurse for 30 years., said she wants the new nurses to be as passionate about nursing as she was when she first started. “But I don’t know if I’m going to be able to see out the final years of my career if it keeps going like this.”
“Nurses were the backbone of the country during Covid,” she said. “They are carers and nurturers, but now nurses are being forced to be militant to protect the healthcare system. I’m really sad that it’s come to this.”
Story by Maya Trotman as part of Massey University student outreach.
