Welcome

To the Northland DHB Anaesthetic Technicians, who have recently joined APEX.

Better, sooner, more convenient – or not?”

Or possibly more pressure on an under resourced service to provide service at the least convenience for the employee? BSMC – the message rings in our ears with the Ministry of Health (MOH) expounding these virtues and their health targets on one hand, whilst zero rating funding and budgets with the other. There is even data available for you and the public to track how well your DHB is performing in each of the target areas: click here to find out more.

Missing from this potpourri of media releases and glossy flyers is the cost to the health professionals who perform the services required to achieve these targets. Indeed, DHB language increasingly implies The Board provides to patients itself, even the Board Chair personally, missing out the obvious link between staff delivering the care to patients so the DHB is able to meet its target.

We are all too familiar with the belt tightening of the DHBs poured out on the intranet and in the media, woeful tales of the need to pull together to maintain service at the current levels whilst putting freezes on recruitment, overtime bans, salary caps and in the latest newsletter to all staff at ADHB the suggestion that your already under resourced department can spare you to take some of your excess Annual Leave. With whispers in the wind from the powers that be, that after July there will be 0% on the table to offer for any further collectives. The mind boggles!

So how do we cope with this?

It won’t be easy. Firstly, let us know immediately if you feel you, your colleagues or patient’s safety is being endangered by staff shortages or unreasonable service demands. Remember that stress and fatigue are safety issues. Ensure that you and your colleagues aren’t working for “love”; some tips…. Don’t mask your staff shortage by working through breaks including shifting QA or CPD activities into your meal breaks! Breaks are necessary to keep you fresh and able to perform adequately; fatigued employees perform less well, are less productive and become less engaged and committed to their work. In the long term this is counterproductive to you, your patients and quite frankly the service your employer is trying to deliver. Whilst the
DHBs may be focused solely on achieving budget by June (read ADHB here), you need to ensure they are reminded there is more to delivering a safe, quality standard of care than meeting budget. Don’t start early or finish late without claiming overtime. Not only are you selling yourself short both financially and in terms of work life balance, but you are negating the triggers we have in health that send messages to management. Increasing overtime means inadequate staff – and to the contrary no increasing overtime means everything is fine.

We know that you feel responsible for the service, and you have the patient’s best interests at heart, however delivering service is a joint responsibility between you and your employer, not a one-sided affair. The employer needs to provide adequate resources to enable the desired level of service, or face up to the growing amount of evidence that an increase in resources or reduction in services will be needed.

This leads us on to… don’t race through your work to compensate for lack of staffing. There are protocols to follow for a reason; these accredited processes ensure quality of procedure and result. When we are under pressure and under staffed we appreciate the temptation to cut corners or maybe not follow procedures to the letter, but this is when mistakes occur. The patient will not thank you for this – especially in the case of a sentinel event and nor will your manager or the disciplinary panel.

As health professionals we must ensure our integrity by the standards we maintain and the quality of our work.

A question

No doubt as controversy swirled around the Banks-Dotcom affair, a recent newspaper article stated that some unions’ fees are directed to Labour Party coffers, subsequently raising a question by a member about whether any of the APEX membership fee was spent in this manner.

In short, it is not. APEX holds the view that we can only be beholden to one master, the members. To be affiliated to any third party runs the risk that conflict could arise with that primary purpose.

Delegate training

Delegates have just completed three days of training in Auckland, and are now armed with a few more tools to assist you back in the workplace.

Topics covered during the training included, tools for the new delegate, salary progression, Registration boards, Clinical Governance, How to manage the poorly performing Employer, the Employment Relations Act, and expanding Scopes of Practice, with opportunities to network with other members of their occupational group as well as other professions from the same employer. We would say their time was well spent with plenty of work, however there were also social opportunities with a field trip and BBQ at the Union office and a fancy dressed theme dinner.

For copies of the speakers notes, and other information shared at Delegate Training, please click here.