Nurses Organisation delegates turn their back on Health Minister Simeon Brown during his speech to the NZNO conference in Wellington.
Photo: RNZ / Ruth Hill
Nurses Organisation delegates have turned their back on Health Minister Simeon Brown during his address to their conference.
Brown told the audience at Te Papa in Wellington that nurses’ strike action was hurting patients.
He said the government valued the work of nurses and urged the union to put patients first.
Rangi Black-Tufi, who led the impromptu protest, said she was angered by what she called the minister’s attempt to guilt-trip nurses.
She said patients were affected every day because of staff shortages and underfunding.
The conference comes a fortnight after 36,000 nurses, midwives and health care assistants walked off the job for two days demanding better pay and increased staffing.
Striking nurses outside Brown’s electorate office on 2 September, the first day of the strike, were met by a sign plastered across his windows which said the union’s strike was disrupting more than 13,000 surgeries and appointments.
A sign on the Health Minister’s electorate office on 2 September.
Photo: RNZ / Felix Walton
The strikes followed nearly a year of deadlocked negotiations between the union and Health NZ, which culminated in a 24-hour strike at the end of July.
A new report by Infometrics for the nurses’ union found hospitals were short an average of 587 nurses every shift last year.
The report released on Wednesday, titled ‘How many more nurses does New Zealand need?’, was based on Te Whatu Ora data from 1.69 million shifts between 2022 and 2024 in 59 public hospitals.
NZNO chief executive Paul Goulter said the findings put paid to Te Whatu Ora’s claims that hospitals weren’t short-staffed.