Top nurses take $7000 rise

Jan Smith plans to bank her $7000 share of the historic 20 per cent pay rise for nurses.

It will help to pay for holidays when she retires.

The pay deal covering more than 20,000 nurses, midwives and health care assistants at the 21 district health boards gives increases of between 14 and 30 per cent.

"It will help to go towards retirement," Mrs Smith, a 57-year-old union delegate and Auckland City Hospital heart ward staff nurse, said yesterday.

"We're not too far away from that," she said of herself and her 60-year-old husband Davis Smith.

"Perhaps we will be able to have a few trips to Australia or around the islands or New Zealand."

At the top of the rank-and-file scale, her base salary will eventually rise by more than $7000 a year, after Nurses Organisation members ratified the deal with 81.7 per cent of those at meetings in support.

Full-timers of Mrs Smith's seniority at many hospitals are now paid $45,000 before allowances and overtime. This will rise to $54,000 in three steps, the last in July next year.

Most nurses and midwives will receive increases of about 20 per cent in the 2 1/2-year deal backdated to last July. It is the first national pay deal since 1991.

The settlement, which will cost the Government $380 million, meets the demands of the union's "fair pay" campaign, which sought broadly to bracket nurses with teachers and police.

"I think it's a positive step," id Mrs Smith.

"We have wanted to do this for a long time."

The increases would help to attract people to nursing training and to stop experienced nurses being lured to overseas hospitals.

The health boards' spokesman, Jim Green, said the deal delivered the consistent, nationwide platform the employers had wanted.

"It will address issues such as recruitment and retention and workforce planning that will help create a more stable, satisfied workplace that will improve patient care."

A Nurses Organisation manager, Laila Harre, said a significant part of the deal was the agreement to set up an independently chaired inquiry to make recommendations on safe staffing levels.

The union has pushed for fixed patient/nurse ratios, varying depending on the type of hospital and ward, after a similar move in Victoria, Australia, was credited with helping to attract nurses back to the job.

But the Government rejected the idea as too blunt an instrument, preferring the subtler approach of hospitals seeking "magnet" accreditation, which is designed to foster nursing careers.

Ms Harre said if the inquiry recommended increased hospital funding to achieve safe staffing levels, health boards were obliged by the terms of reference to join the union in seeking that from the Government.

Having won its fair pay campaign for health board nurses, the union is now battling to win similar rises for primary healthcare nurses and aged care nurses and caregivers.