Paul Goulter: Nurses' Organisation CEO on the strike action taking place today

The nurses’ union is confident today's strike won't negatively impact patients. 

Bargaining between the Nurses Organisation and Health New Zealand is deadlocked, with workers opposing changes which would see a reduced number of nurses caring for patients. 

They say it risks patient safety and are walking off the job at every Te Whatu Ora facility nationwide between 11am and 7pm today.  

Nurses Organisation Chief Executive Paul Goulter told Ryan Bridge it's a necessary move. 

He says it's what the nurses want, saying they're exasperated by the bargaining process. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Don't go to the hospital today. Thirty six thousand nurses
on strike. Paul Goalzet is the New Zealand Nurses' Organization
chief executive. He's with us this morning. Paul, good morning,
Good morning. Now, no one is going to die because
of the strike, are they. You've got life preserving services
ready to go.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Yeah. Each hospital is required to ensure there's a minimum
number of staff to ensure patient care continues.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
It's all over, ironically actually safe staffing levels. And you
think the changes that have been made will mean that
there will be fewer nurses on a shift. Do you
know how many fewer it might mean?

Speaker 2 (00:36):
No, no, we don't because it varies. The very nature
that staffing system that they want to pause means that
there's great variance across the different wards, et cetera, according
to just how many patients have gotten and just how
sick or injured those particular patients are. So there's great variants.
And we have actually tried to ascertain through official information

(00:58):
requests from the Fatal War exactly what that number looks like,
but we can't get that data.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
They won't give you the data on how many nurses
are needed per patient to be safe.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
We'll put it another way, how many short they are
on each shift?

Speaker 1 (01:16):
Right? Well, that seems a bit MINGI of them.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
I would have thought, yeah, yeah, if you try to
work together with an employer, that's pretty critical information and
it's been being withheld and we've really asking for that
through the bargaining as well, through the good faith provisions
and the bargaining. But we would like to work together
on this rather than just have them make unilateral decisions.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
If your goal is highlight to the public how unsafe
staffing is, is taking you know, thirty six thousand nurses
off for an eight hour shift the last way to
make the point.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Well, this is what the nurses themselves asked for. You know,
we've been bargaining for a number of months. They're exasperated
by how the process drags on and it happens every
time we do this. And then finally to funtal War
came up with the sort of these are our two
key positions. One is this are safe staffing, pausing that,

(02:14):
et cetera. That alarms nurses because already they are understaffed
and pausing it exacerbates that problem. And also there's issues
around the wage increase as well.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
All right, Paul, thank you very much your time. Appreciate
it. It's Paul Galter. He's the New Zealand Nurses Organization chief executive.
That struck between eleven am and seven pm today and
people saying, don't worry, you know no one will die. Well,
I mean you can't say that, ken, you don't know
that for sure. But they're basically just saying you will
still be able to access healthcare should you need it,

(02:45):
especially if you are in a critical condition and the
need of that. By the way, their pay increase that
they were looking at that he was just talking about it,
then half a percent they've been offered for April twenty
twenty five year, and then one percent the year after that.
They say it's not inflation, so it's essentially a pay cut.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
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