Some aged care nurses are earning about $10,000 a year less than their hospital counterparts just because of their employer. Photo / File
Some aged care nurses are earning about $10,000 a year less than their hospital counterparts just because of their employer. Photo / File
COMMENT:
Why are registered nurses who work outside of District Health Boards (DHBs) so undervalued?
All registered nurses are highly trained and skilled professionals who ease pain and help save lives. Yet successive governments have enabled a growing pay disparity between nurses who care for people in public hospitals andthose who care for people in aged care facilities.
Right now, that gap is sitting at around $5 an hour – that means aged care nurses are earning about $10,000 a year less than their hospital counterparts just because of their employer.
How can that be justified? Aged care nurses attend to some of our most frail and vulnerable people, often with chronic and acute health conditions ranging from kidney disease and congestive heart failure to failing and broken bones, mental instability and much, much more.
Indeed, arguably aged care nurses have a heavier load given they do not have access to the clinical support teams of specialists and doctors on hand in public hospitals. They are also responsible for supervising teams of caregivers.
Yet New Zealand still pays them $5 an hour less.
How can that be right? Especially at a time when the latest Colmar Brunton poll shows that caring for our older New Zealanders is now one of the top 10 things Kiwis care most about.
It is not right. It never has been, though the pay disparity has always existed.
The many aged care facilities in the sector run by trusts, religious and welfare organisations, or as not-for-profit entities, simply can't match the pay rates of the DHBs because of the capped funding they get from the government
Even more absurd is that the gap has widened thanks to the 2018 DHB Nurses Multi-Employment Collective Agreement (MECA) which also required DHBs to recruit 500 more nurses - effectively, an active recruitment of precious nurses from aged care facilities that are not funded to match pay rates.
Those providers that can afford to match pay rates have a retirement village operation and property portfolio that they can use to cross-subsidise care facilities, which increasingly retirement village operators are expected to provide as a continuum of care is what village residents now expect.
But for the many aged care facilities in the sector run by trusts, religious and welfare organisations, or as not-for-profit entities, they simply can't match the pay rates of the DHBs because of the capped funding they get from the government.
The fact is that aged care is a critical mainstream function of our healthcare system – yet is not valued as such.
The DHB model aims to get vulnerable elderly people out of public hospital beds as quickly as possible and into aged care beds. Part of that is because there is a shortage of public hospital beds, but aged care beds are also significantly cheaper. The average cost per day of a hospital bed is $600, compared to $200 for an aged care bed.
When you consider that there are some 11,000 hospital beds versus 39,000 beds in aged care facilities, you start to realise the critical role played by aged care nursing staff who are essential to delivering the requisite level of care.
Simon Wallace. Photo / Supplied
Shortages of nurses in the sector have been dramatically accelerated by the MECA settlement. However, we congratulate the Government's recent immigration decision to respond to our calls for aged care nurses to be added to the Long-Term Skills Shortages List (LTSSL). This will enable providers to more easily recruit internationally qualified nurses given the shortages of New Zealand nurses.
However, until we pay aged care nurses the same as hospital nurses, no matter how much training we provide, we will never attract a strong workforce of Kiwi nurses.
As a society, if we really value the care of our older people, we must have pay parity across a common pool of nurses that work in our healthcare system.
Until we do, we will continue to send the message that how we care is not fair.
