As a registered nurse (RN) for more than 13 years, with extensive hospital and community experience, I have just returned to the paid nursing workforce after parental leave.
I had been unexpectedly made redundant from my practice nurse position after the collapse of my GP clinic left more than half the staff unemployed and was an easy casualty as I was already on parental leave.
Seeking to rejoin the nursing workforce, I applied for multiple roles, both in the hospital and community sectors, only to be met by a series of autogenerated replies from Te Whatu Ora informing me I was unsuccessful.
Throughout this time, I was in contact with several charge nurses I had previously worked with who repeatedly told me they needed nurses to fill multiple vacancies but “were not allowed to advertise yet” and so couldn’t offer me a job.
After initial contact with a ward for potential work at the start of November, the job vacancy listing didn’t become available until January the following year, at which time it was for only one nursing position, and then interviews didn’t begin until February.
How is one nurse supposed to safely and competently meet the workload and experience of multiple nurses who have left? Te Whatu Ora has continually assured its “cost-containment” methods would not be affecting frontline staff and services, but when nursing vacancies are left unfilled for months at a time and then patched with sub-optimum staffing numbers, how can they not be?
We already know the impact on both staff and our patients. How can we then create safe environments for patients, staff and new graduate nurses?
As a private nursing tutor for several years, I have the privilege of working with students in the bachelor of nursing (BN) and the graduate-entry master of nursing practice (MNursPrac) programmes. These are bright, enthusiastic and capable new graduates who, although willing and ready, do not have the experience that can only be gained from working in the health-care sector — a chance few of them are now getting to realise in Aotearoa.
How much longer is this impossible Catch-22 allowed to continue? The incredible, talented and experienced nurses needed to not only be the foundation of our health-care system, but the guardians to nurture our future nursing generations, are forced to work in over-demanded, under-resourced settings now seemingly accepted as commonplace.
Those like me, trying to rejoin them, are locked out by arbitrary and dangerous cost-cutting measures, and those new graduates who are accepted into the NEtP programme are unintentionally left with whatever remains in a chronically impoverished system.
With the release of the Health Minister’s Health Infrastructure Plan to address “under-investment” and “asset renewal”, I wonder how much longer the true assets needing investment, nurses, will be left to depreciate beyond recognition and repair.
Sarah Fraser-Clark
BN, PGDip Nursing Science, BA