Austerity in Healthcare as Margie almost hits the million dollar club

Meanwhile, support staff are understaffed and skipping tea breaks.

Oh the irony of a story on the Health NZ CEO making $895K on the same day nurses are striking. Nurses are said to have been offered a pay rise that is less than half the rate of inflation. Unsurpisingly, they said no thank you.

Mgmt is also freezing CCDM (care capacity demand or somesuch), a software program that compares nurse staffing to patient numbers throughout the day. It’s been a way of proving understaffing vs safe staffing vs overstaffing (I’ll let you guess which one it regularly showed), and now it’s been frozen. So they can improve it or something like that.

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Backoffice vs frontline support?

Overnight there used to be two admin staff covering all of Northland (Dargaville, Kaitaia, Bay of Islands, and Whangarei hospitals) logging patients in, answering phone calls, and putting out emergency calls in the case of the ambulance bringing in a big trauma or a hospital ward having a code blue (critically ill patient requiring immediate care). At times they’re expected to call up to 12 people, like surgeons and CT radiographers, in the middle of the night. Its a tough job.