KEY POINTS:
Nurses weighed down by debt will be able to sign into the Government's student loan write-off scheme by February 27, under plans outlined by the new Health Minister.
Within hours of being sworn in yesterday, Tony Ryall said he intended that some people start entering the new voluntary bonding scheme, designed to help fix the health sector's workforce crisis, within the Government's first 100 days in office.
Legislation would not necessarily be required to implement the National Party policy of offering bonding to doctors, nurses and midwives in return for writing off student debt.
"I expect it can be done in a contractual and administrative way."
He had spoken to senior Health Ministry officials since the election on the six health policies National was committed to implementing within 100 days - halting growth in health bureaucracy, revealing the true state of the "crisis" in health services, funding a 24-hour Plunketline phone service, extending access to breast cancer drug Herceptin, starting work on creating 20 new elective surgery theatres and voluntary bonding.
"I also talked to them about some of the other policy commitments that feature in our manifesto material. We are beginning a process of getting things moving."
Mr Ryall said the work had started on identifying the hard-to-staff locations and specialties to where the bonded jobs would be offered.
National's election policy said the scheme would be open to nurses, midwives and doctors who had graduated since 2005 and it would later be extended to other health workers.
The bonding period would be three to five years. The first three years' worth of loan write-offs would be made after three years in the bonded job; the rest would be annual.
The write-offs would be capped at around $10,000 a year, the expected level of payments for doctors.
The sum for nurses and midwives was expected to be around $3500 a year.
The participants would still have to make minimum repayments on their student loans.
A business studies graduate, Mr Ryall, who is also Minister of State Services, entered Parliament in 1990. He was a minister, from 1997, in the last National-led Government, holding the portfolios of justice, state-owned enterprises, local government, youth affairs and Housing New Zealand.
