O’Malley, who has been Chief Nursing Officer for seven years, is to become Plunket’s first Chief Nurse in March, in a role reporting to Plunket chief executive Amanda Malu.

O’Malley said it was a coincidence and “unfortunate timing” that her announcement followed shortly after Director General Chai Chuah’s resignation. She added that she had a “great deal of respect for Chai and his vision for the future” and was not leaving because he was leaving. “Sometimes great opportunities come up and you need to grab them with both hands.”

O’Malley said she was very much looking forward to working with the Plunket leadership team on their strategic vision as it was a “perfect fit” with her own health philosophy.

“My belief in the New Zealand Health Strategy – and in particular that we can make better inroads into improving people’s health by paying attention to the early years – is reflected in Plunket’s vision for the first 1000 days of life,” said O’Malley. That it was also a nurse and consumer-led organisation also fitted well.  She said she would bring with her to Plunket a wealth of knowledge about how the machinery of Government worked and how policy was developed.

O’Malley said she had mixed feelings about leaving her current role as she had loved her time at the Ministry. Some of the highlights were the coming into effect in January of the long-awaited Health Practitioners (Replacement of Statutory References to Medical Practitioners) Act – which removes legal barriers to nurses and nurse practitioners working at the top of their scope – plus the development with the Nursing Council and NNO (national nursing organisations) Group of the now three levels of nurse prescribing.  Also the creation of the ACE new graduate job system which meant there was now a database of new graduate job hunters which had helped employ more new graduates as vacancies arose.

“There are lots of good things to celebrate and time really for me to move on to something new,” said O’Malley.

She said once it was known in the New Year about the appointment of an acting Director General she would be keen to ensure that the Chief Nursing Office position remained at the executive level of the Ministry and reported to the Director General.

“Because nursing is the largest workforce and it is, I believe, the workforce that if better utilised will take us into the mid-Century.  So we need a strong leader at the top,” said O’Malley.

Plunket chief executive Amanda Malu said the appointment to O’Malley to the new role recognised the importance of the nursing profession to Plunket.

New Zealand Nurses Organisation Chief Executive Memo Musa acknowledged the hard work Chief Nursing Officer Jane O’Malley had done to increase nursing input into Ministry of Health policy and congratulated her on her new appointment.

Musa said  that during Jane’s seven years of service she had overseen an increase of resources at the Ministry to ensure the advice from the nursing profession is effective and timely.

“We want to see more nurses at the top table of policy discussion and development, and there is still more to do to make sure nursing is fully utilised to its full scope in order to care for people, whānau and communities and improve health outcomes,” Musa said.

“We look forward to working with Jane in her role at Plunket as she works to advance and promote the hard work nurses do in their delivery of world class nursing services to mums, whanau and babies.”

Professor Jenny Carryer, executive director of the College of Nurses said O’Malley had been instrumental in ensuring nursing’s contribution to health policy was stronger than it had been “for a long time”.

“The size and positioning of the Office of the Chief Nursing Officer under her leadership has finally been positioned in a way that enables appropriately significant input,” said Carryer.  “Jane has worked so hard across so many fronts and her contribution has been huge.  Her passion for child health will be well matched in her new position and the College of Nurses wishes her well.”

O’Malley was the director of nursing for the West Coast District Health Board when she was appointed to the Ministry of Health role – then called Chief Nurse – in 2010.  She had also been a president of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (from 2001-2005) and is a former clinical nurse manager and nursing academic.

Memo Musa, head of the New Zealand Nurses’ Organisation and  Professor Jenny Carryer, executive director of the College of Nurses were responding to Health Minister Dr David Clark’s announcement today of the urgent establishment of a five-member Ministerial Advisory Group.  That announcement followed quickly in the wake of the early resignation of the Director-General of Health and Ministry of Health chief executive Chai Chuah announced yesterday.

Musa applauded Health Minister David Clarke’s decision to set up an advisory group to take a really good look at the health service.  “…However nurses must be included at this level of decision-making.  We will raise this issue with the Minister next week.”

Likewise Carryer described the new advisory group as “an excellent opportunity” to provide an urgent challenge to the health status quo but said it was “deeply disappointing that a senior nursing voice is not present” on the group.

“Well over 40,000 nurses are closest in every location to the consumers who are the centre of our focus and thus they have a great deal of insight into the necessary changes,” said Carryer.

Musa added that the issues facing nurses and the nursing profession  – like safe staffing, new graduate employment, nurse workforce shortages and pay equity  – would require “strategic foresight, courage and determination to resolve.”

Carryer said under Chai Chuah’s leadership the Ministry had “had a vision of what needed to change in health to accommodate the future”.  “However they have struggled to align operational concerns with that vision. Often that is because the same interests are always around the table providing advice and determining the future.”

Musa said Chuah had made great contributions to the health system in a number of senior health management roles, including overseeing the review of the New Zealand Health Strategy while he was Director General.

“Chai’s stewardship of the health system has been at times managed under extreme pressure but throughout these times we have had a good working relationship with him,” Musa said.

“The health system has been under strain because of the previous government’s decisions to underfund it year after year. DHB chief executives are under huge pressure too and some resigned.”

“They were constantly asked by the last government to cut costs, at the risk of patient and staff safety. This is clearly an unacceptable proposition and this stress has also strained professional relationships at the top level of management and across the health system.”
Musa said it was now important to quickly establish stable leadership at the Ministry so the new Government’s ambitious health programme could be implemented.

The Ministry of Health today released the key indicators from the 2016/2016 survey which showed that 99,000 or 12.3 per cent of children aged 2 to 14 are obese up from 10.7 per cent in the 2015/16 survey and 8.4 per cent a decade ago.

The biggest increase though was in the number of obese pre-schoolers (aged 2-4) which jumped three per cent to 10.5 per cent.

This result reversed a trend of childhood obesity rates starting to stabilise in previous annual surveys, in particular pre-schooler obesity rates had fallen in the 2015/16 survey to 7.3 per cent which had been the lowest rate since the surveys began ten years ago.  (A child is classified as obese if they have a BMI equivalent to an adult BMI of 30 or more.)  The one positive childhood obesity trend was a stabilising of Pacific childhood obesity rates – while they remained at a high 29.1 per cent this was down on the 29.8 recorded last year.

The statistics are based on face-to-face interviews with adults that were conducted between July 2016 and June 2017. Over 13,000 adults, and the parents or primary caregivers of over 4,000 children took part in the survey which includes weighing and measuring the adults and children to calculate their body mass index (BMI).

Adult obesity results from the 2016-17 survey also showed an increase with 32.2 per cent of adults obese – up on 26.5 per cent in 2006/2007 and slightly up on the 31.6 per cent rate in 2015/16.

The survey showed that while obesity rates continue to rise parents appear not to be concerned about the impact on their children’s health with 98.1 per cent of parents rating their child’s health as good to excellent. Likewise 88.2 per cent of adults rate their own health as good.

The full statistics can be viewed here.