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When Geoff Annals stepped into the NZNO chief executive’s job in 2001 – a year of strikes and strife – it was a fill-in post for three months. Leaving nearly 12 years later he talks to FIONA CASSIE about some of the good, the bad, and the cyclical in nursing in that time.

Farmer’s son Geoff Annals was not won over by his first encounter with the then New Zealand Nurses Association.

“I didn’t join up as a student, which most people did,” he recalls. Whoever came selling student membership left him decidedly unimpressed. “All I thought they were doing was trying to sell insurance and I didn’t really like that.”

He did join as a graduate nurse in the early 1980s and remained a member until restructuring in 1992 saw his job as principle nurse of Waikato Hospital disestablished and he wound up as general manager of the hospital instead. Nearly a bruising decade later he left that post and was ‘between jobs’ when offered a temporary stint as CEO at the New Zealand Nurses Organisation and enjoyed the job so much it became permanent.

He has continued to enjoy it but nearly 12 years on he’s started to have an increasing sense of déjà vu … it was time to move on.

Getting back to basics

Back in 2001 the health sector was still more than a little shell-shocked from the fallout of ongoing restructuring for a decade or more and nurses were striking in pockets around the country.

Already well versed in being on the other side of industrial action as a hospital manager, it seemed to Annals “a lot of energy was going into unproductive activity”.

Meeting with the Canterbury District Health Board nursing negotiation team after their strike action prompted the organisation to stop, take stock, and try a different tack.

“I felt like we were almost caught in a mind warp, that all we could do was the stuff we didn’t like.”

Travelling the country meeting literally hundreds of members during a national roadshow, he says he found it “liberating” and “empowering” as common themes started to emerge from both the professional and industrial arms of NZNO and those advocating for the Treaty of Waitangi and partnership. Be it professional standards, employment issues, or bicultural partnership, the common aim was to improve the health of their patients.

“I remember thinking that we really had a strong basis for how we approached things … nurses’ work was about making people and communities healthier … it was probably where we were at the time. People were wanting to consolidate, get back to basics, and unify. I was lucky enough to be in this role at the time this was going on,” recalls Annals.

It was possibly more leadership than luck, but this modest man would be unlikely to admit it.

This was the period when NZNO started its MECA pilgrimage – pulling together region by region a multi-employer collective agreement (MECA) after the old national nursing award disintegrated under the 1991 Employment Contracts Act.

“When we started talking about reconsolidating employment agreements, neither members nor employers wanted it. That surprised me quite a bit.”

District Health Board members liked negotiating more closely with managers at a local level and employers liked negotiating deals that reflected their needs.

“It was an interesting process of re-discovering the value (of a national agreement) for employers and members”.

Part of that was process was the growing desire to move from traditional position-based bargaining – usually best of a bad lot for both parties – to interest-based bargaining, which better reflected the ethos of nursing values and NZNO.

Annals says it was hard but rewarding and laid the building blocks for the historic pay jolt MECA of 2004, which happened without industrial action.

“We’d come out of times of confrontation and division and everybody was fed up with it.”

Another building block for the new bargaining culture – and one Annals is proud to be part of – was negotiating the Health Sector Code of Good Faith between Council of Trade Union members and DHB chief executives.

NZNO constitution and presidency

At the other end of his stewardship, Annals leaves having watched over the introduction of a new NZNO constitution that has not been without ‘hiccups’ or controversy.

He says both technical and social hitches have made the process “a bit lumpy”.

“We are still between governance process; we’re halfway through the old system and halfway into the new, and it will continue to be a bit lumpy until we’re right through that.”

“I would have probably finished up sooner because it felt like time, except I wanted to see us at least through the worst of that and see the light on the other side. That’s where we are now.”

And financially? The latest NZNO journal Kai Tiaki reports that the unions financial position had improved. It was still heading to a further deficit but it was now forecast to the end the year with a deficit of about $175,000 rather than the predicted $225,000.

“NZNO has been an unusual union in that it’s grown consistently forever, really, and I think back in 2001, we had only 30,000 members,” recalls Annals.

“It has grown strongly (currently about 46,000 members) but so has the demand of things that NZNO need to do.”

The organisation in particular has grown its professional services arm with completely new positions added to the payroll.

“The costs of an organisation like ours will continue to creep up … and that does impose financial challenges.

“Of course members will always want fees to be as low as possible and so does the NZNO board but there’s just a housekeeping reality about that.”

A new cost under the constitution is a full-time paid president and a full-time paid kaiwhakahaere.

“That’s both exciting and challenging – having a co-leadership model fully in place for the first time … I think it’s a very appropriate but also very challenging, particularly when they are both full-time employees.”

He believes challenge is usually a good thing.

“NZNO is a hugely diverse and robust organization, and it thrives on working its way through challenges. We will never have anything that all members will agree on – and it would probably be a terrible thing if we did. Again we have our democratic processes and I find that they get things right.”

Politics and frustration

All in all, Annals looks back at his decade plus as the male chief executive of a woman-dominated organisation as “a real privilege”.

“The interactions have almost always been very rewarding, and productive and we’ve achieved a lot of things.”

But the cyclical nature of the health sector means there have also been some frustrations along the way.

He recalls staring out in the role at a time when health was becoming increasingly less politicised, with policies like the Primary Health Care Strategy getting essentially bipartisan support.

“So it was a good environment to bring a whole lot of different perspectives to bear on issues.”

Now he says everything in health appears once again to have a political dimension and open dialogue is stymied by worrying whether somebody’s particular position is being advanced or not.

“I don’t think it is either a Labour or a National thing. I actually think it’s cyclical – and it’s not exclusive to health ... I hope we get through it before too long because it stifles informed debate and it stifles innovation. We desperately need to be innovative in the broadest sense.”

He’s not happy with the results. In a small country where it is not difficult to get interested people and experts around the table to work through solutions, he says we appear instead to be taking an old-fashioned and discredited approach of setting quick turnaround targets for the public sector and then enforcing them.

“I think we need to mature past that … rediscover visionary leadership, the importance of influence, and harnessing the energy and commitment of the health sector.”

“Health is the only sector I know but my experience of everyone in health, whether it is managers or workers at whatever level, is they are typically, if not universally, really interested in getting the best outcomes for people.

“I don’t think we tap into that enough.”

Likewise, there is a risk of switching that energy and commitment off.

Then there is the cyclical nature of nursing supply and demand. Starting in a high turnover, high vacancy culture, he leaves NZNO in a recession-led “bubble” of low turnover, low vacancy, and new graduate unemployment, despite a looming nursing shortage.

He says that is another objection he has to politics and “shutting down and narrowing down informed debate and channeling it into camps,” says Annals.

“The political is a short-term view. It is always tied to the electoral cycle and it is bound up with the mid-year of the term. We have to take is a longer term view and we will never get out of those boom and bust cycles unless we do so.”

At heart he is an optimist about the future for both NZNO and nursing. While he believes too much energy expended is lost energy and too often the barrier to innovative progress is a lack of trust.

“We’re not nearly as distrustful of each other as were in back in 2001. There’s a lot of goodwill and trust around.”

“I’m not at all pessimistic about where we are going.”

Annals had his last day on February 15, and he was not clear where his career may lead him next, but one can be optimistic it will continue to involve him making his gentle and intelligent mark on nursing.