{"id":615562,"date":"2026-09-29T17:58:43","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T17:58:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/615562\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T17:58:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T17:58:43","slug":"health-nz-agrees-to-24-new-nurses-for-north-shore-hospital-after-nightmare-winter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/615562\/","title":{"rendered":"Health NZ agrees to 24 new nurses for North Shore Hospital after ‘nightmare’ winter"},"content":{"rendered":"

North Shore Hospital emergency nurses have secured a victory – and are set to get the staff they have been asking for<\/a> since before their “nightmare” winter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Health NZ has promised to employ 24 new nurses – one shy of the number the ED nurses said they were promised months ago.<\/p>\n

The nurses spoke out in August about how they were struggling in an emergency department that sometimes had triple the number of patients it was staffed to deal with.<\/p>\n

They called it a state of emergency, saying patients were being left in soiled beds and they were worried they could not care for them safely.<\/p>\n

Shortly after, Health NZ started to recruit for nine nurses, and on Tuesday said it was hiring another 15.<\/p>\n

ED nurse and Nurses’ Organisation delegate Jean Classey said she and her colleagues were “elated”.<\/p>\n

“I don’t think we would have achieved this if we hadn’t stood up and spoken out. They would have left us languishing – so for us it is an absolutely amazing victory.”<\/p>\n

The extra staff would make a huge difference for patients, she said.<\/p>\n

It would mean more nurses to care for them in every part of the emergency department and it would be harder to miss anyone deteriorating fast, she said.<\/p>\n

North Shore Hospital’s boss Brad Healey said it was “wonderful” to be able to fully recruit for the ED.<\/p>\n

“They’ve been under enormous pressure. Much more pressure than we expected when we were doing our winter planning. The volumes coming through has been very challenging,” he said.<\/p>\n

In a letter to the nurses seen by RNZ, he thanked them for advocating for their community.<\/p>\n

“We recognise that staff have repeatedly raised concerns regarding workload, patient safety, overcrowding, and the ability to consistently deliver the standard of care that both patients and clinicians expect,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Your concerns have been heard and taken seriously.”<\/p>\n

Recruitment had already begun and he did not expect any delay, he said.<\/p>\n

Waitakere Hospital, which had also been under massive pressure this winter<\/a>, was to get a total of 15 nurses, some of who were already being recruited.<\/p>\n

Healey said lessons would be learned from this winter when work began to prepare for the next one.<\/p>\n

“With hindsight, I think we would all say it would have been better to have had additional resource in place but we just didn’t know.”<\/p>\n

Classey said there was still huge work to do to try to stop patients being cared for in corridors, or to stop patients being stalled in ED waiting for a hospital bed.<\/p>\n

She hoped other nurses around the country would be encouraged by their victory to keep fighting for what they needed.<\/p>\n

“Because we know across New Zealand there are shortages in every other bit of healthcare,” she said.<\/p>\n

The new nurses would be part of the 380 announced last week nationwide, after Health NZ released its annual calculation of staff needed.<\/p>\n

That comes after the organisation’s two year hiring go-slow<\/a> to try to save money.<\/p>\n

The North Shore nurses had initially asked for a total of 25 nurses for the department but a slight change in the way staff were catergorised meant that was now 24, Classey said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"North Shore Hospital emergency nurses have secured a victory – and are set to get the staff they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":615563,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[134,527,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-615562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615562","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=615562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}