From nurse education, clinical, or workforce issues through to healthy living, Nursing Review has it covered.

With the junior doctors long-running roster row nearly settled, the next major health negotiations to get underway, the NZNO DHB Nurse MECA, is also likely to have a safe staffing focus.

The New Zealand Resident Doctors Association and District Health Boards agreed a deal this week – now going to ratification – that includes a new Safer Rosters schedule that reduces the maximum number of consecutive roster days from 12 down to 10 and the number of consecutive nights shifts down from 7 to four.  The proposed new multi-employer collective agreement (MECA) also includes a 1.5% per cent salary increase (effective from February 13), a lump sum payment and increased hourly remuneration for working additional duties.

Lesley Harry, industrial advisor for the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO), said it would be surveying its DHB members in April over what they see as the key issues going into bargaining this year.  The current DHB NZNO MECA is due to expire on August 31 and negotiations were likely to begin in early June.

She said some issues were already clearly on NZNO's negotiations agenda including safe staffing and the "way to slow" implementation of the Care Capacity Demand Management systems developed to address the issues by the joint union-employer Safe Staffing Healthy Workplace unit. 

"We'll be taking a pretty firm line with safe staffing – and CCDM is the mechanism to address this," said Lesley.  "We're continuously hearing about situations that can only be described as unsafe and that can just not continue."  The CCDM tools and the SSHW Unit grew out of the DHB NZNO Safe Staffing inquiry report of 2006.

Harry said with an announcement expected soon on an equal pay settlement for aged care, home care and disability support workers the NZNO DHB negotiating team would obviously also have to examine that settlement "very, very carefully" and its impact on its DHB membership – not only health care assistants but also the impact on enrolled, registered and senior nurses.

In the lead-up to negotiations NZNO would also be looking at other issues like pay parity with benchmark professions, like teachers and police, and the impact of changing models of care on roles like the nurse practitioner and upcoming nurse prescribers.