Photo: Unsplash / RNZ
Health New Zealand aims to recruit staff faster and redesign how patients get care under its latest workforce plan released on Tuesday.
The plan has five priorities covering the next three years, none of them surprising.
"Our current models of care are not sustainable," the 20-page plan said, adding it had to work "within the funding we have available".
The plan said one lever it had was to "reset our workforce funding to improve impact". However, the "reset" was not elaborated on, and the plan had little else to say about changes to workforce funding in general.
The plan said the workforce had expanded a lot, up three percent in just a year and 14 percent since 2020, and investment was beginning to pay off - but overall everyone was less productive.
"We are not making best use of their talents," it said.
Things must change or health would need 4000 more nurses in 10 years, plus 3500 more doctors and an extra 4500 other medical workers.
"This is a roadmap for how we as a country can achieve the best possible health outcomes ... and is an important step toward addressing our current health crisis," chief executive Margie Apa said in the foreword.
The plan aims to address this with mostly more healthcare outside hospitals, such as at GPs - what it dubbed, "Move care closer to home" - and more training.
It had yet to arrive at solid estimates of how these changes might impact current and future need.
"Accepting that nothing can change is not tenable," the plan said.
It sketched seven "levers" as specific as introducing more earn-as-you-learn and part-time training and faster processing for international workers, and as vague as "improve leadership and the experience of work".
Another lever was to invest in technology "across the system". However, HNZ is moving to axe 1100 data and digital jobs, and put more than 130 IT upgrades on ice.
The workforce plan had to translate into "a more financially sustainable system", it said.
"This will require responsible trade-offs between new workforces, volumes of care delivery, and tackling insufficient workforce supply."
Each initiative had an implementation plan and funding that would be published alongside its first progress report, and reports would come out quarterly.