Te Whatu Ora has laid off over 500 people due to significant changes in the country’s healthcare system.
According to The New Zealand Herald, this occurred just 18 months after the agency replaced the 20 district health boards in 2022 to enhance the efficiency of health services.
In a meeting with the Health Committee at Parliament, Margie Apa, CEO of Health NZ, said that there had been a hiring freeze for non-frontline jobs since ‘day one’.
Currently, the directive has resulted in laying off 500 people and dissolving 2300 jobs.
According to The New Zealand Herald, the laid-off employees of around 1,600 will receive over $9 million in payments.
Putting resources in places with few staff
Apa talked about how these steps to combine departments have helped the government save about $139 million in the first fiscal year.
She also said that putting health services in one place has made it easier to respond to infectious diseases and give resources to places that need them.
Health New Zealand’s chief clinical officer, Dr. Richard Sullivan, said that wait times for surgeries have gone down and that more orthopaedic operations have been done in the last six months.
He said that efforts to get rid of long wait times for regular surgeries have made a lot of progress. The number of people waiting more than a year for their procedures dropped from 12,000 to 600.
This is in addition to what the New Zealand Herald reported that Health NZ executives said they had done to solve the shortage of healthcare professionals by hiring more nurses and increasing the number of GP trainees.
