Statement attributable to Dr Richard Sullivan, Health New Zealand Executive National Director – Clinical

Patient and staff safety is Health New Zealand’s main priority.

Shift below target (SBT) data highlighted by the New Zealand Nurses Organisation is not a proxy for understaffing. It is a ‘moment in time’ measure, that is often capturing just five minutes of an eight-hour shift.  Using this data in isolation to claim that wards are under-staffed and unsafe is misleading.

Health NZ is absolutely committed to ensuring that we have the right staff and skill mix to deliver quality, safe patient care.

There’s no one, internationally agreed, way of determining how many nurses, doctors, mental health professionals or allied health staff should be rostered to work each day.

Here in New Zealand, we use a range of tools, including calculations based on historical data about the number of people needing care and the complexity of that care, information about the mix of staff rostered on a particular shift and the professional judgement of our frontline leaders.

There are significant challenges in our current approach to safe care methodologies, including variable data quality. For this reason, we don’t believe the current tool, which we don’t believe is used by any other country as a national tool, is fit-for-purpose.

We have established a quality improvement work programme to develop a safe care approach for nursing across all Health NZ hospital settings and are committed to establishing a National Safety Nursing Council with unions.

Clinical outcomes in our hospitals which are sensitive to staffing numbers show that patient safety is stable overall.

Patient safety measures such as in-hospital deaths, surgical site infections and in-hospital falls have been stable or improved over the last five years.

Right now, I believe the biggest risk to patient outcomes is the waiting lists for elective surgeries, first specialist appointments and the time it takes to be seen in emergency departments. We are actively working to reduce our waitlists, and the numbers are coming down as we boost services right across the country, but the ongoing strike action by nurses is impacting on this work.

We are committed to ensuring that we have the right staff and skills mix in the right place at the right time to deliver high quality and safe patient care.

There are now more nurses working in our hospitals than ever before, with over 35,000 nurses across the country.

Over the two years to March 2025 our nursing FTE increased by over 3,000 and turnover has dropped from 13.3% to 8.1% over the same period.

The national nurses’ strike on 2 & 4 September will see an estimated 2,251 planned procedures, 3,600 first specialist appointments and 8,000 follow-up appointments postponed.

Postponed surgeries and first specialist appointments result in our waitlists growing longer and increasing patient safety concerns as people wait longer for the care they need.

Ahead of the strike we are concerned by misinformation from NZNO members about what constitutes life preserving services during a strike and suggestions that such services do not include the provision of meals or the administering of medication.

We have raised our concerns with the union and sought reassurance that NZNO members providing life preserving services during the strike will continue to care for patients as required and this includes ensuring meals are provided and medications are administered.