{"id":588041,"date":"2026-09-02T14:54:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T14:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/588041\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T14:54:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T14:54:11","slug":"gisborne-hospital-ed-nurses-to-strike-over-understaffing-on-september-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/588041\/","title":{"rendered":"Gisborne Hospital ED nurses to strike over understaffing on September 9"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking to the Gisborne Herald, Dolman-Tuhou said nurses were \u201cexhausted\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re so understaffed right now … the anxiety\u2019s at an all-time high and the morale is low.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christine Warrander, another New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) delegate and an acute care nurse, said nurses were regularly \u201cin tears\u201d during and after hard shifts.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can see on their faces as they\u2019re coming in to do a shift, they\u2019re just defeated … they\u2019re completely broken down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both delegates described regularly skipping meal breaks on shift and working multiple 12-hour shifts a week to keep up with demand.<\/p>\n

Hospitals across the country are straining under one of the worst influenza seasons yet<\/a> and understaffing issues.<\/p>\n

Last week, the NZ Herald reported that in 2025, almost a quarter of all nursing shifts were understaffed<\/a> at some point.<\/p>\n

Tair\u0101whiti fares better than the national average for nursing shift staff levels, with 9.5% of shifts below target staffing levels, 17.9% at target and 72.6% above target in 2025.<\/p>\n

However, research released in July revealed that Gisborne Hospital had \u201cmarked inequities\u201d<\/a> compared with other hospitals in the country when it came to specialist dental care.<\/p>\n

Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora confirmed it had been notified of the strike and the ED would remain open during the hour of the strike.<\/p>\n

\u201cTair\u0101whiti is in an ongoing process looking at emergency department nursing staffing levels to ensure we have the right workforce capability, capacity and skill mix to deliver safe, high-quality patient care,\u201d it said in a statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis has been a collaborative process with the NZNO organiser and delegates. There have been several opportunities for feedback throughout and we remain committed to working in good faith as this process continues.\u201d<\/p>\n

While progress had been made lowering the hospital\u2019s senior doctor vacancies, delegates said nurses were still under pressure.<\/p>\n

Chief medical officer for Tair\u0101whiti Dr Nejat Zeynologlu said the vacancy rate of senior doctors was not reflected in the quality of care at Gisborne Hospital<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, both NZNO delegates said they would not want their family members receiving care at the hospital at this point.<\/p>\n

Neither delegate had met Zeynologlu in person and \u201chardly ever\u201d worked alongside senior health officials.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t even know what [Zeynologlu] looks like,\u201d Warrander said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s an issue. There\u2019s people [at the] top level making decisions, but they\u2019re not actually coming down and talking to the people on the ground level, finding out actually what the issues are and how it can be resolved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zeynologlu declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Minister of Health Simeon Brown was approached but declined to comment directly. In a statement, the minister said that the delegates were working through a \u201dgenuinely hard winter\u201d and the Gisborne workforce was \u201cconsiderably larger than it was three years ago\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cGisborne is one of the best-performing districts in the country against the Shorter Stays in Emergency Departments health target. The district is admitting, discharging or transferring 91.3% of ED patients within six hours, against a national target of 95% by 2030,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n

It said Health NZ advised that two nurses in Gisborne had worked over 90 hours during a recent fortnight.<\/p>\n

\u201cHealth New Zealand also advises that some nursing staff welcome the opportunity to pick up additional shifts and proactively offer to do so \u2013 this happens under every government.\u201d<\/p>\n

As delegates prepare to strike, Warrander said the concern of patients being affected by understaffing weighed heavily.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf something doesn\u2019t change, I think our fear in general in the nursing community is there\u2019s going to be something happen to a patient.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter how many times we can yell and scream and say it\u2019s unsafe, [at the] end of the day it\u2019s going to be pinned back on to the nurse, and that\u2019s a scary aspect for all of us, and we don\u2019t want that happening to a patient.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaking to the Gisborne Herald, Dolman-Tuhou said nurses were \u201cexhausted\u201d. \u201cWe\u2019re so understaffed right now … the anxiety\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":588042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[284860,26034,13973,15974,4522,12506,134,27501,10938,2241,37056,35020,111,43,139,9709,69,10711,90,4989,1523,25394,154770,5843,8037,251441,44970,4485,8229,61,219319,1533,80],"class_list":["post-588041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-delegates","tag-department","tag-ed","tag-emergency","tag-feel","tag-gisborne","tag-health","tag-heard","tag-herald","tag-hospital","tag-leonie","tag-mills","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nurses","tag-nz","tag-officials","tag-on","tag-organisation","tag-over","tag-protest","tag-reporters","tag-senior","tag-september","tag-sheehan","tag-spoke","tag-strike","tag-they","tag-to","tag-understaffing","tag-will","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588041","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=588041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/588042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=588041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=588041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=588041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}