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Nursing and Health Workforce New Zealand agree on the urgency of nursing issues and are gingerly moving forward after meeting in the wake of nursing’s severe criticism of HWNZ’s performance to date.

Representatives of the three nursing and midwifery organisations, which late last year penned the critical open letter, met with the HWNZ executive chair, director, and several board members in mid-February to discuss the issues raised.

Professor Jenny Carryer, executive director of the College of Nurses, said the College and New Zealand Nurses Organisation reiterated their concerns about the complete lack of transparency and consistency about HWNZ processes.

“And that they have failed to utilise nationally comprehensive nursing advice in the development phase of projects. It is no use informing us after the fact.

“However we all agreed that the workforce issues for nursing are so urgent and so very critical that none of us want to spend time relitigating the past,” said Carryer.

“We sincerely hope we can work differently in the future, and that HWNZ will become more respectful of the vast amount of knowledge and experience and research, both national and international, that already exists to underpin our advice.”

Brenda Wraight, HWNZ unit director, said HWNZ had a very constructive meeting with NZNO, College of Nurses, and College of Midwives, discussing how the organisations could be more engaged and involved in HWNZ’s work programmes.

“We have ensured that nurses have been actively involved in our work,” said Wraight. “But recognise that we need to ensure the mechanisms are in place for the national bodies to contribute to thinking and decision-making relating to workforce planning and innovation at all stages of the process.

“We recognise and value the input of the nursing and midwifery organisations to our work and aim to find ways to strengthen it further.”

Wraight said she hoped to attend the next meeting of the National Nursing Organisations (NNO) group.

Ex-NZNO CEO Geoff Annals on HWNZ

Geoff Annals, the now former CEO of NZNO, says from the outset he had been a strong supporter of the concept of HWNZ but the potential had failed to deliver.

He said he welcomed HWNZ’s formation as an opportunity to take a longer-term strategic view, isolated from the ‘here and now’, so sound decisions could be made to put the health workforce on a sustainable path.

“But I don’t think it has performed at all.”

Annals was one of the nursing sector leaders that made up HWNZ’s nursing champions group, a group formed at the request of HWNZ as a conduit for communicating back and forth with the nursing sector. Annals represented professional organisations and other nursing leaders represented education, regulators (the Nursing Council), employers, and policy (the chief nurse Jane O’Malley).

HWNZ chair Des Gorman has said he was disappointed at the open letter’s criticism and that the champions group appeared to have failed to do its job as a communication vehicle for engaging with the nursing sector.

Annals (speaking prior to the meeting between HWNZ and nursing groups) believed a big part of the failure of HWNZ to perform in nursing workforce planning was its failure to understand how the nursing sector works, and the champions group encapsulated that failure.

“For a start, nursing hates the title (champions) that was put on the group – I think by HWNZ – and is ‘barely tolerated’,” said Annals. “Also it was a complete compromise in the way that nurses work.”

Annals said at the time HWNZ was formed nursing was already in a “unified shape” and the NNO group was the place where representatives from each of the nine national organisations talked about issues.

“Each of those groups – I can talk from NZNO as we are a large group of 46,000 members ­­– operate through democratic processes. So the notion of having a subset of people who somehow speak for nursing and become a mechanism by how HWNZ works, it never can work.”

Annals said he believed Gorman’s disappointment affirms that HWNZ had been seeking was for the champions group to be a mechanism to “manage the difficult nursing workforce”.

“Our nursing processes will always require proper analysis, evaluation, lots of input, and democratic process, processes of intelligence gathering, problem identifying, they take time. They don’t operate with one or two people making a decision in a room.”

He said that didn’t mean that nursing wasn’t ready to face up to the need to change to meet health service needs.

“There’s almost kind of a hunger for change. It just has to be the right change and people just need to be convinced that things will be better and it’s not going to cause harm.”

Annals said he didn’t believe Gorman needed to worry too much about nursing as the NNO forum and the Ministry of Health’s chief nursing office (CNO) were well aware of the issues affecting the sector.

“I think he (Gorman) could sleep easy if he was sure that the CNO were resourced to get on with it.”

Annals noted that the current Director General of Health, Kevin Woods, had elevated the position of Chief Nurse back to executive level within the Ministry of Health.

“The resourcing increased a little bit but is still ludicrously small when you think that nursing is 60 per cent at least of the (health) workforce,” said Annals.

“What nurses are often not ready to express is how voiceless or how little value is taken from the expertise that 60 per cent of the workforce have.”

He said the chief nurses’ office also drew on the ‘virtual office’ expertise of the NNO members and directors of nursing but was not formally or adequately resourced to do so.