"Nurse Safe Staffing?" Never heard of it.

"Safe staffing" protections are being eroded. Let's supercharge them.

There’s something called CCDM, a piece of software that shows a hospital whether the number of nurses working at the moment is appropriate for the number of patients in the hospital.

It’s being frozen. Dunno when it will return.

Govt says it needs to be repaired. Some healthcare workers say it’s because it shows, in black and white, when the hospital is understaffed.

Therefore, it must be gotten rid of.

I can’t help but think there’s some truth in this.

I watched as the current government got rid of “Code Black”: a level above Green (‘good’), Amber (‘getting overloaded’), and Red (‘not working too well anymore’). Black meant ‘Stuffed’. It was a wake-up call to managers, and a black eye to politicians.

Therefore, it got erased. No more ED “Code Black”. Just the other three colours. So now the worst we can ever get in ED is code red, a commonplace, almost meaningless occurrence. ‘There, that’s not so bad, is it?’

In the face of all this chicanery, I think we need to go back to simple ideas: that New Zealand is rich enough to provide dental care and health care so people don’t suffer unaffordably and needlessly. A sick population is not a productive population.

So let’s Think Big. We can guarantee basic free healthcare for every NZer. We can go way beyond CCDM, to set up nurse to patient safe staffing ratios to ensure patients are not neglected on the wards.

Might Luxon have to give up the tax-free sales of his 4th house this year, to pay for a functioning society? Yes. But that is a sacrifice that the people of New Zealand should be willing to have him make. He and those like him have profited off the goodwill of others’ labour for long enough. The freeloading must end.

#SafeStaffing