{"id":548850,"date":"2026-07-29T02:42:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T02:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/548850\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T02:42:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T02:42:22","slug":"patient-fell-trying-to-kill-cockroaches-at-auckland-hospital-fleas-hit-wards-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/548850\/","title":{"rendered":"Patient fell trying to kill cockroaches at Auckland Hospital, fleas hit wards"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elliott said she tried to stomp on the three small bugs, but slipped and fell.<\/p>\n

\u201cI yelled out, and there were about 10 staff members who came racing, picked me up and took me down for an MRI scan to make sure I hadn\u2019t done any damage to my head when I fell.\u201d<\/p>\n

She hadn\u2019t \u2013 but the cockroaches were not the only concerning observation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I had a heart monitor on, the heart monitor didn\u2019t work, so they had to change it for another one. The second thing that didn\u2019t work was the drip, and they had to change that for another one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Staff were also in short supply, she said, with one staff member for five post-surgical patients on her ward. A physiotherapist told her there were two of them on shift, with a caseload of 36 patients that day.<\/p>\n

A Nurses Organisation<\/a> delegate told RNZ there had been a recent increase in reports of fleas, cockroaches and other insects within the wards.<\/p>\n

Many wards still had carpet flooring, which was the perfect breeding ground for fleas, they said.<\/p>\n

The Health NZ website says cockroaches can spread diseases<\/a> like dysentery, salmonella and diarrhoea, and they \u201cthrive in unhealthy environments\u201d.<\/p>\n

The delegate understood some wards were going to be refloored with vinyl in the coming months, although the work had been delayed by budget restrictions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my wards that I work in, we\u2019ve got two toilets that don\u2019t have the toilet seat lid,\u201d the delegate said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s quite common for bathrooms to not have hot water running. It\u2019s quite common for showers to have very low water pressure.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo patients have to then go and find another room to have a shower in, which causes more struggle in terms of logistics.\u201d<\/p>\n

They said it was also common for observation equipment to malfunction, or not collect accurate data.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we send the equipment off for maintenance checks and to get repaired or get new ones.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut because there\u2019s quite a strict, tight budget within the hospital at the moment, nurses are having to stretch two or three throughout the whole ward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patients and staff had reported flea bites, with some staff even reporting accidentally passing them on to their own homes and families.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur patients shouldn\u2019t have to have to deal with this in the hospital,\u201d the delegate said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd it\u2019s quite embarrassing as a healthcare worker in the hospital knowing that our standards should be really high, but we\u2019re not given the resources or the safe environment to be able to provide our care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Health NZ\u2019s group director of operations for Auckland, Dr Michael Shepherd, told RNZ in a statement: \u201cLike many large campuses, we have experienced flea activity from time to time.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said 142 flea-related incidents had been reported across Health NZ\u2019s Auckland sites in the past year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese reports are actively managed through our pest management programme and have reduced significantly in recent years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shepherd said there were comprehensive cleaning, facilities and equipment maintenance programmes operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week.<\/p>\n

He said work to replace carpeted areas with vinyl flooring was underway across Health NZ facilities, but had to be carefully planned to minimise disruption as it often required clinical services to be temporarily relocated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elliott said she tried to stomp on the three small bugs, but slipped and fell. \u201cI yelled out,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548851,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1975,51,92558,13989,269568,2518,134,527,3594,2241,2517,14910,111,139,69,1597,61,28355,57284],"class_list":["post-548850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-at","tag-auckland","tag-cockroaches","tag-fell","tag-fleas","tag-green","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-hit","tag-hospital","tag-kate","tag-kill","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-patient","tag-to","tag-trying","tag-wards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}