Health NZ Cuts May End Student Placement Program

Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora has proposed cutting a project team responsible for removing one of the key obstacles in growing New Zealand's health workforce: finding student placements.

Public Service Association Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi national secretary, Fleur Fitzsimons, says that they're extremely disappointed to hear that Health NZ has decided to cut another essential group of staff.

"The Health NZ Workforce Development team, who have been tasked with growing New Zealand's health workforce, is one of the latest groups to be put up for disestablishment at the agency," she says.

One of the Workforce Development group's major projects, developing a new digital tool to centralise opportunities for student placements, is also set to close, despite receiving high praise from educators brought in to test it.

"Student placements has been identified as a long-standing, critical obstacle in growing the number of skilled health workforce in New Zealand that our population needs, and that this project was set up as a direct result of feedback from the health and education sectors. This decision will make fixing our health workforce shortages even harder.

"The team has seen from its testing stage that this digital tool could make the whole placement process much more efficient for both educators and clinicians."

Currently, education providers must manually contact health providers (such as hospitals) to organise places for their students. As a result, student placements - which are a requirement for dozens of qualifications - can be highly competitive.

On the other side, the general administration of placing students at placement providers is pushed to already over-stretched clinical staff.

"It's pretty clear that this is a short-sighted development. The Government has committed to a whole new medical school, with a whole new cohort of students who will need placements.

"By cutting this team, you might save a few dollars now - but as the country's population ages and the need for health services increases, we'll pay dearly for the under-investment."

AUT Head of Department for Perioperative Practice, Megan Richardson, says the tool has been transformative for her team, who used a pilot version of it to place student anaesthetic technicians at medical providers around the country.

"It has successfully facilitated placements across more than 40 hospitals in Aotearoa New Zealand, opening access to both public and private providers, and significantly reducing the administrative burden on both the health sector and my clinical coordination team at AUT," she says.

"As the only national provider for the qualification for anaesthetic technicians, the tool has helped AUT secure more placements each semester, ensure equitable distribution and allowed us to focus on workforce development rather than coordination.

"The tool has been well received, and the support and training from the workforce development team has been instrumental in delivering a solution that works for us."

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