Cost-cutting consequences

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

The reason Healthcare New Zealand took over the support worker contract from CCS, who had ably run it for 30 years in Tairāwhiti, was because they would be “cutting costs”.

HCNZ’s latest cost-cutting onslaught has been to shorten support worker care times with clients.

Community support workers attend to people in their own homes. It is a free service and a lovely tradition, especially for the elderly and disabled, who may have no family living close by.

For some clients that we support, it takes at least an hour to attend to personal care, which includes cleaning teeth, showering, washing hair, drying, applying creams, dressing, attending to hearing aids and spectacles, making the bed, changing soiled linen, disposing of sanitary wear, drying the bathroom, making breakfast, prompting medication and writing up records.

Whoever is in charge of reducing these care times for our vulnerable whānau has obviously never had to support them in a day-to-day fashion, and has no idea of what is involved in doing almost everything for someone with Alzheimers, for example.

Because support workers love their job, and are doing it because, on the whole, they are kind, caring people who give a damn, they continue to do the job regardless of how long it takes. You cannot leave a client in a soiled state just because the time allocation is up.

As a consequence of officially having time docked, pay is docked accordingly — this is where the cost cutting comes in, one supposes!

Stress levels are high among support workers because of the pressure placed on them to do a complex job in less and less time. They have to keep in mind the next client they have to attend, and there may be many clients in one day. There is now often a 30 minute time allocation to do everything involved in personal care for a client.

With Healthcare NZ covering the whole country, and all the small locally run centres closed, we have to ask if this is an efficient way to care for our most vulnerable, and are the people at the top taking a cut in their pay?

SERIOUSLY CONCERNED