For some time there has been this cascade of bad news from the Health sector.
As a recent example there is this touching story about a family whose two year old son is sick with cancer whose treatment was compromised by a lack of resources. Although the family are clearly grateful for the help being provided to them they cannot help but fault the health system for its failure to provide adequate care.
From Radio New Zealand:
The mother of a toddler whose cancer treatment was delayed due to staff shortages at Starship Hospital says often her son was screaming and writhing in pain while they tried to get help from a nurse.
She said she was heartbroken and doubted the health minister’s assurances the jobs were being recruited for.
Some chemotherapy and bone marrow treatments have been delayed at the children’s hospital for up to seven days due to lack of staff.
Tanya Lapu’aho’s two-and-a-half year old son Killian was diagnosed in January with high-risk neuroblastoma.
He’s since had multiple stays at Starship for rounds of chemotherapy and two bone marrow transplants, and is moving on to radiation and immunotherapy.
Lapu’aho said timing is everything with cancer treatment – but her son’s second bone marrow transplant was delayed at least a week because there were not enough specialist nurses to carry out the treatment.
She said babies were bearing the brunt of delays.
Lapu’aho said and her son had been in Starship Hospital many times with the two longest stays lasting just over a month and it was obvious that the nursing staff were under a huge amount of pressure.
Initially they thought delays to her son’s surgery were for medical reasons but they were then told it was due to staffing shortages, she said.
“On a day to day basis it looked like our son screaming and writhing in pain and us calling for our nurse and her wanting to come straight away but her not being able to because she had too many other things to do – you know duties to carry out, other patients to take care of – to the point where it was taking on average about 20 minutes, half an hour on a really busy day for a nurse to come to the room and respond to you pressing the nurse call button.
“And most of the time we were pressing that button for pain relief because our boy is in so much pain from the cancer, from the chemo, from everything.”
Something that is not reported in the article based on her interview is her intention on how she is going to vote this election.
She said this:
It has got my non political family ready to hit the polls on election day to vote this Government out. It is so unfair what is happening to the nurses at Starship.”
Her heartwrenching story comes on top of news that Auckland Hospital’s Oncology Department has had to delay treatment because of a shortage of nurses.
From Lane Nichols at the Herald:
The nurses’ union says nearly half of shifts on Starship children’s hospital’s oncology ward were below safe staffing levels this year, and health bosses should have hired more nurses rather than delaying cancer treatment for sick kids.
“It shouldn’t have come to this,” New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) president Kerri Nuku said.
“Health Minister Simeon Brown can argue oncology services are being postponed and not suspended, but such semantics are unlikely to be important to whānau with children with cancer.”
The Herald revealed today that, because of nursing shortages and high demand at Starship’s paediatric haematology/oncology service, some cancer treatments had been “rescheduled”.
Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora confirmed this afternoon that 20 cycles of chemotherapy had been delayed over the past four months by up to seven days.
A source told the Herald that staff were horrified to learn of the developments last week, and that management was “terrified” about the information leaking out.
Simeon Brown claimed it was a “handful” of chemotherapy sessions and that two bone marrow transplant operations had been “slightly delayed”. Note to Simeon 20 equates to four handfulls of fingers not one.
Then to really have you scratching your head was separate news that the Government had issued a direction to limit nurse enrolments. The TEC has asked Nursing Schools to limit enrolments to 2025 levels because there was not enough room for extra student nurses to complete clinical placement.
I mean what?
When the pressure on the health system has not been more pronounced we want to reduce the number of norses being trained? Please make this make sense.
And National has this behaviour tick of engaging in the most horrendous rhetoric. Truth is bent within an inch of its life.
Like National’s claim that it has trained over 2,000 nurses when the truthful answer is that it has funded the training of 56 nurses and all the rest were funded by the last Labour Government.
You know how National repeatedly claims that the spend by the last Government was wasteful and that there was nothing to show for the extra spend?
Another piece of rhetoric that National engages in is to claim that the health spend is at record levels.
While this is numerically correct if you factor in population change, inflation and the increasing cost of providing health care for an increasingly ageing population then the spend is going backwards.
And the crises in our hospitals is clear evidence of what is happening.
Of course Labour’s rather cautious fiscal policy does not leave much roomm ot move. But if you are looking for a party that will address the health crisis and make sure it is properly resourced then vote Labour.