A nurse. Photo: 123RF
Angry nurses accuse Health New Zealand of putting cost-cutting ahead of patient safety with its proposal to park a critical safe staffing protocol.
The Care Capacity Demand Management System calculates the number of nurses needed in each area based on how sick patients are and how much care they need.
Health New Zealand said it was considering "a pause" on the system while it considered ways to make the system more "consistent".
However, a Nurses Organisation delegate, Nathan Clark, said that would be tantamount to "a pause on patient safety".
"Is the next step to completely scrap what we use as a baseline for safe staffing and our measurables for safe staffing?
"Is that the insidious line we're going to go down?
"What do we use as a benchmark for patient safety?"
Clark, who is based at Hutt Hospital, said patients were already experiencing the impact of short staffing every day in almost every department in every hospital.
"They see good people, great people, struggling to do their jobs in an under-resourced and broken system."
Health New Zealand's own workforce report last year showed the health system was short more than 4000 nurses.
In response it hired more than 2000 - but the cost of that was subsequently blamed for driving its financial woes, with management saying recruitment had "gone ahead of budget".
Nurses Organisation chief executive Paul Goulter said his members were "alarmed" that Te Whatu Ora was proposing to pause the Care Capacity Demand Management System.
"It's a needs-based system, which they don't have the budget to deal with. So you get this binary between is our health system about needs to be met or costs to be capped?
"And the costs to be capped is winning at the moment."
In a written statement to RNZ Health New Zealand / Te Whatu Ora spokesman Mark Shepherd - its deputy chief executive for the Northern Region - said the aim was to provide "consistent, high-quality care within the resources available and ensure staff and patient safety".
"We are not pausing the CCDM programme but rather we are considering pausing the CCDM FTE calculation while we undertake quality improvement processes," he said.
"No final decisions have been made and we will continue to discuss these matters with the unions with workforces where we use CCDM."
Meanwhile, NZNO members - nurses, midwives and healthcare assistants began a series of 62 one-hour stop meetings on Monday, which will end on Friday.
Top of the agenda is Te Whatu Ora's intention to pause calculations for the CCDM safe staffing programme during collective bargaining late last month, along with the employer restricting bargaining parameters to 1 percent of total employee costs.