With 10% vacancies in aged care, the New Zealand Government is signing off on a new District Health Board deal with nurses that includes a promise to supply an extra 500 nurses to address concerns about staffing levels.
“The drift across will also make it almost impossible to attract new graduates to aged care ... they might end up robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Professor Jenny Carryer of Massey University’s school of nursing said.
The gap between aged care homes and public hospital pay in New Zealand is estimated to be between $6 and $10 an hour.
Aged Care Association chief executive Simon Wallace said his organisation already had 500 out of 5,000 nursing positions empty and he was certain more would leave to take up new contracts with public hospitals.
The Government has provided three pay increases of 3% as well as an immediate response of $38 million to finance recruitment.
However, NZ Nightingales Fight for Fair Pay spokeswoman Danni Wilkinson says the extra 500 staff will not guarantee safe staffing.
“I think the problem is while they can hire 500 nurses, it's not going to stop 1,000 leaving,” she said.
“When you strip the numbers back, 500 new nurses is only going to give each shift in every ward in the country, not even 10 per cent of a nurse.”
The Aged Care Association has warned some facilities will be forced to close their doors due to staffing shortages. Just last week, Anglican Care in Christchurch announced that it will shut down two of its aged care facilities, saying it was losing money and is unable to compete with the larger commercial providers.
The Association is now seeking to reverse a 2016 immigration policy change, so nurses can be included in a Long-Term Skills Shortage category to provider migrant nurses with more certainty that they can stay in the country.
The New Zealand news comes at the same time as a new Department of Health and Social Care report in the UK said that they are facing a “worst case scenario” where because of Brexit, a lack of European Union migrants could result in women being forced to quit work to look after elderly family members.
EU migrants make up 7% of all adult social care staff – around 90,000 workers.
Other European countries also rely on foreign workers coming through the EU system. As we reported here, Germany is currently looking to address its aged care workforce shortages by recruiting workers from Kosovo and Albania.
