Clinicians concerned about loss of IT staff - unions

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Unions representing doctors and health staff are concerned about the impact of losing data and digital roles as Health New Zealand – Te Whatu Ora implements a hiring freeze and offers voluntary redundancies.

The national organisation has called for expressions of interest in voluntary redundancy from specialists working in information and analytics roles, administrators, procurement and supply chain, policy and programmes, communications, finance, and HR.

Speciality Trainees of New Zealand (STONZ), a union representing junior doctors, is concerned about the impact of “so-called back-office redundancies” on frontline medical staff and their patients.

STONZ executive member, Emma Littlehales says, “our members have already seen the effect of a hiring freeze on their work and how it has taken away practising time from them and increased their non-clinical hours. There is a real risk that this gets worse with these further cuts.

"We also have significant concerns about the loss of any health IT staff including data and digital functions and the further impact this will have on RMOs. It can already take up to an hour to get through to the IT helpdesk in some districts, and as a doctor if we cannot access patient care systems such as notes or theatre bookings, it directly affects patient care,” she says.

“Around two thirds of doctors' hours worked in New Zealand hospitals are worked by RMOs, the more of those hours that are lost to admin work means fewer hours available for treating patients.”

A commissioner has been installed at Health New Zealand with the goal of finding $1.4 billion in savings from the organisation’s budget.

A statement from chief executive Margie Apa says the organisation needs to “move towards being a more efficient organisation and focus our resources on the delivery of frontline healthcare.

“A number of initiatives are already in place to support this, but it is now clear that, by themselves, they will not resolve the financial issue or help ensure we have the right people in the right places,” she says.

“As a majority of our expenditure is on people costs, Health NZ needs to review its size and structure. We are therefore providing the opportunity for eligible staff to consider voluntary redundancy ahead of likely formal change consultation processes over the coming months.”

The Public Service Association (PSA) union says “hordes” of vital health roles are already unfilled and hundreds of experienced workers are now expected to leave the health system.

“We stand to lose people keeping medical records safe, getting our health data in front of clinicians, scheduling our scans and operations,” PSA national secretary Kerry Davies says.

"Politicians target people working behind-the-scenes because they think they can get away with it. But clinicians are well aware patient care depends on administrators, IT support, and logistics workers,” Davies says.

"There are already excessive vacancies being carried in these roles because of the hiring freeze. It will be unreasonable to expect people who already have demanding workloads in a stretched health system to take on even more work because of these cuts.”  

Picture: STONZ executive member, Emma Littlehales

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