Photo: Unsplash / RNZ
Doctors at Hutt Hospital are being asked to make beds and clean medical equipment, on top of a busy patient workload.
An email sent to all ED staff and seen by RNZ lays out which cleaning tasks are expected of clinical staff, and which are to be done by cleaners.
Clinical staff are expected to clean, among other things, commodes, hoists and patient washbowls, as well as beds, lockers, soap dispensers, sluice sinks and biohazard bags.
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One doctor, who RNZ has agreed not to name, said: "One shift I made seven beds, answered a million phone calls, and fixed the printer. Is this a really good use of my time? I suspect I'm the most expensive person there."
Meanwhile, they said the workload was increasing, and staff were slow to be replaced when they resigned.
"It's smoke and mirrors," they said. "So it's officially not a freeze but on the front line, the reality is it's a freeze, because people go off on maternity leave, and you can't replace them without a long-winded process to get authority to recruit."
The doctor said there were a number of vacancies that had not yet been approved for replacement, which meant other clinical staff were picking up the workload, and it meant some patients were not even getting in the door due to long wait times.
Little things were being missed. "I've come onto a shift and seen an 80-year-old lady trying to climb out of her bed with the sides up to get to the toilet, and there was no one around to help her."
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The cleaning tasks were on top of all that. The department was sent an email in early July laying out the tasks.
"When I'm making beds, I'm not seeing a patient," the doctor said - and that email was the first they had heard of a formalised expectation that clinical staff should be cleaning medical equipment.
But Te Whatu Ora Capital, Coast and Hutt Valley group director for operations Jamie Duncan said this was not a new arrangement.
In a statement, he said: "There has been no change to our cleaning arrangements or funding.
"The email [...] relates to a longstanding practice where our cleaners do not clean Hutt ED medical equipment, areas or items that may hold private patient information, or areas where patients' personal belongings are stored.
"Areas such as these are cleaned by clinical staff, with the work usually undertaken by health care assistants."
On Friday morning, the health agency provided further comments, reiterating that there had been no changes to cleaning arrangements or funding, and there had always been an expectation that doctors help where they could - and there were instances of cleaners performing tasks outside their remit, too.
It said when a printer malfunctioned, an automated message was sent to the provider and a technician was sent as soon as possible - "usually immediately" - to repair it, and it could not speculate about why a doctor would have taken it upon themselves to try to repair it.
In the case of the patient struggling to get out of bed, "it may be that they tried to do so without requesting assistance just as this doctor was passing".