Source: Radio New Zealand
A rally for the aged care sector and its workers in 2024. RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
The Aged Care Association says the sector needs better funding to be able to compete with the public sector for nurses.
It comes after public and mental health nurses employed by Health New Zealand ratified their new collective agreements over the weekend, after 18 months of bargaining.
Chief executive Tracey Martin said nurses in aged care, who were not Te Whatu Ora employees, needed to be better paid in order to compete with the public sector – and to do that, the sector needed more funding.
“The nurses inside aged residential care have the same qualifications, they do the same if not more complex work, and yet they don’t receive the same remuneration because the funding model from government actually doesn’t fund equity of pay across those nurse workforces.”
An ageing population was set to put more pressure on the health system as a whole, Martin said, so aged care needed to be able to attract and retain skilled workers.
“As long as it is treated as a secondary career option, compared to going and working in hospitals for Health New Zealand, then we’re going to struggle to make sure that we have the workforce required to deliver the services and the care that the predicted number of New Zealanders are going to need over the next 25 to 50 years,” she said.
At the moment, while rural and regional areas were harder to staff, the aged care sector was doing okay, because Te Whatu Ora had not been hiring in the same volumes due to its own cost pressures.
But Martin said 70 percent of the aged care workforce was from overseas, which showed New Zealanders were not choosing jobs in aged care.
“The moment Te Whatu Ora starts hiring, because of the funding model residential care is working with, many nurses [will] then go to work in hospitals.”
Martin said the government, as the primary funder of aged residential care services, needed to increase funding – and not just for wages.
“Many providers are currently operating below the true cost of care,” she said.
“When a general uplift is fully prescribed to wages, it leaves no capacity to address rising food, utilities, insurance, compliance and capital costs. That places ongoing pressure on service sustainability.”
In October, a ministerial advisory group was announced to make recommendations updating the system, including a look at the funding model.
The government was spending $2.5 billion a year on aged care, which was provided privately, to accommodate the 900,000 New Zealanders over 65. That number is expected to increase to 1.3 million by 2040.
The advisory group was expected to report back by the middle of 2026, with any changes to the funding model implemented in 2027.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
