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Speaker 1: And seemingly never ending battle over healthcare in this country.

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Speaker 1: Later stat show on average we were five hundred and

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Speaker 1: eighty seven nurses per shift short last year. This is

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Speaker 1: some inframetrics work done for the Nurses Council. Now. Rob

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Speaker 1: Campbell is of course the former Health New Zealand chair

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Speaker 1: and he's back with us.

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Speaker 2: Rob.

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Speaker 1: Morning to you, Mike.

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Speaker 2: See you can do a lot with numbers this morning.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, you can do a lot with numbers country one

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Speaker 1: point sixty nine million shifts. So what does that mean?

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Speaker 1: I mean, being five hundred and eighty seven short on

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Speaker 1: average out of one point sixty nine million shifts between

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Speaker 1: twenty two and twenty four. Is that a disaster? Is

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Speaker 1: it a bit short?

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Speaker 2: Is it? What is it? It's more than a bit short.

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Speaker 2: It's probably on its own short of a disaster. But

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Speaker 2: it's just something that we've known. Everyone working in or

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Speaker 2: around the health system has known that a lot of

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Speaker 2: shifts were short staffed for nursing staff and other staff.

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Speaker 2: So it's proving something we knew and they're only having

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Speaker 2: to prove it because the management and politicians have been

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Speaker 2: denying something that we all knew was true.

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Speaker 1: So it went from six point eighty four on average

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Speaker 1: down to five eight seven. So is this the changes

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Speaker 1: announced and more nurses being employed. Is that slowly but

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Speaker 1: surely improving the scenario.

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Speaker 2: I think it's been in blocks, Mike. There have been

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Speaker 2: some pretty big recruitment campaigns. There's also obviously some leakage

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Speaker 2: to Australia and out to the private sector, but there's

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Speaker 2: been I think a minor improvement. But the problem is

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Speaker 2: that the demand side is also increasing, so this is

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Speaker 2: a difficult issue for everyone involved. To me, the issue

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Speaker 2: here is we know this's a big issue for everyone involved.

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Speaker 2: We know that staffing is a problem. We've got to

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Speaker 2: be able to deal with it openly and honestly. And

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Speaker 2: I think the thing that disturbs me is not such

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Speaker 2: the numbers, because they were really known. What disturbs me

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Speaker 2: is that Health New Zealand ministers and the ministry we're

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Speaker 2: all trying to deny that this was happening when we

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Speaker 2: all knew it was true. It doesn't help.

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Speaker 1: Is it a dispute over numbers? In other words, they're saying, no,

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Speaker 1: these numbers are wrong and we're not short. Or is

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Speaker 1: it simply about money? Yes, we can employ hundreds more,

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Speaker 1: but we don't have the money to do it.

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Speaker 2: Well, I think they obfuscate. At the end of the day,

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Speaker 2: these numbers within some range of being accurate at this time,

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Speaker 2: because of course they look back historically. So there is

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Speaker 2: a problem. The first thing you've got to do is

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Speaker 2: to admit there's a problem and then sit down and

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Speaker 2: work out what the solutions are. At the moment, what

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Speaker 2: the nurses and others have had to face is people

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Speaker 2: saying there's not a problem, you're wrong and they knew

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Speaker 2: they went wrong, and now everybody knows they went wrong.

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Speaker 1: The other part of the question, even if we did

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Speaker 1: have the money, is there is there the supply there

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Speaker 1: or do we have to tap the international market or

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Speaker 1: if we tap the international market to exhaustion.

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Speaker 2: I think we know we haven't tapped it to exhaustion.

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Speaker 2: But it's also not a long run answer. That you

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Speaker 2: need to be able to plan these kinds of workforce things,

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Speaker 2: and so we do need more training of these sorts

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Speaker 2: of skills, and we need to be able to offer

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Speaker 2: secure employment to those people. So it's a long term issue.

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Speaker 2: This is not something that's going to go away by

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Speaker 2: employing a few hundred more nurses in one block. It's

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Speaker 2: an ongoing issue that we've got to address openly.

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Speaker 1: Good insight. Rob appreciate it. Rob Campbell, who is the

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Speaker 1: former chair of Health New Zealand.

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