Trades and support roles

Where kaiāwhina and care workers deliver work directly with patients and whānau, those in other support roles (like tradespeople, hospital administrators, ward clerks, cooks, cleaners and clinical coders) also work on the frontlines of our services – but don’t typically deliver care directly to patients. Some of these workforces work directly for Health NZ, while others are contracted by third-parties.

As with kaiāwhina, we have relatively poor data on the range of people employed in support roles across the health system, and on what our real need for workforce is. 4,518FTE trades and support workers are employed in our hospitals – though still more work in aged care, in urgent care, and in other primary and community settings. Our support workforces have significant Māori (11.3%) and Pacific (7.3%) representation.

The biggest challenge in our support workforces is that many of our most experienced staff are aging – and often without clear succession plans to ensure a good transition when they retire. Many of these workers have been in our health system for decades and have a deep working knowledge of our facilities, so ensuring that they hand this knowledge over is vital to the continued sustainability of our services.

In frontline administration – such as hospital support worker and ward clerk roles – we have seen recent growth in demand, driven by a desire to better support frontline clinical staff by reducing administrative burdens. We think this trend is likely to continue in the short-term, while we pursue technological solutions to alleviate administrative burden on our staff (such as AI-assisted transcribing).

Relatively low workforce demand across most of our trades and support roles gives us an opportunity to focus on medium-term sustainability. If we can grow new cohorts of workers keen to take on these roles as our workforces age, we can set ourselves up well for future sustainability.

Over the next three years, we want to emphasise:

• Improved attraction. We want to focus on improved attraction to these roles for young people to maintain a healthy workforce profile.
• Greater flexibility for staff. At the same time, we need to improve flexibility for some of our staff – including for those heading towards retirement – to allow them to participate in the workforce as long as they like.
• Improving progression opportunities. Some of our support roles have relatively few opportunities to progress, which can make them less attractive pathways into health. We think we can do more to strengthen these routes – such as to hospital support worker roles, or from theatre orderlies to theatre assistants.