Striking senior New Zealand doctors have hit back at the Health Minister’s attack on their union for “forcing” patients to wait longer for surgery and appointments, due to their 24-hour industrial action.

Respiratory and sleep physician Dr Andrew Davies, who was on the picketline outside Wellington Regional Hospital, said for him and his colleagues, it was “not about the money” — it was about the inability to recruit.

“We’ve got vacant jobs that we’re not allowed to advertise,” he said. “It’s lies that they’re not getting rid of frontline staff.

“The job is technically there on paper, but if you’re not going to advertise for the job, you’re not going to fill it.

“In our department, we’ve waited months and months and months to fill some jobs, and you don’t just get a doctor next week. It takes six months for them to come.”

Dr Davies said no-one wanted to strike and have their patients miss out on care, but thousands of patients were already missing out on care every day, due to staff shortages.

“Every week, we’ve got empty clinics,” he said. “There is space in the clinics that’s not being used, because there’s not a doctor in the chair there.

“While, today, that’s 20 percent of the work of the week gone, because we’re on strike, in some departments, it’s 20 percent every week.

“Every day of the week, there’s a 20 percent deficit in the number of patients people are seeing.”

5500 doctors on strike
Nationwide, about 5500 members of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists are on strike until 11:59pm today, causing the cancellation of about 4300 planned procedures and specialist appointments.

In a social media post, Health Minister Simeon Brown blamed the union for the disruption, saying an updated offer last week — including a $25,000 bonus for those moving to “hard-to-staff regions” — was rejected by the union, before members even saw it.

Union executive director Sarah Dalton said she would be very happy to facilitate a meeting between doctors and the minister — or he could accept the invitation to attend its national conference.

“They would love to feel like someone up there was listening,” she said. “They don’t at the moment.

“We need to move away from rhetoric, and actually have some time and space for meaningful discussion.

“That’s one of the reasons we’re on strike today. After eight months of negotiating, there was nothing on the table from the employer.

“It was only after we called for strike action that anything changed, so let’s do better.”

Critical workforce shortages were undermining patient care and the current pay offer, which amounted to an increase of less than one percent a year for most doctors, would do nothing to fix that, Dalton said.

“How do you tackle vacancies? You put more time and effort in good terms and conditions for your permanent workforce, and you stop spending spending $380 million a year on locums and temps.

“We shouldn’t have that heavy reliance on those people, so we’ve got to change it.”

NZ training doctors for Australia
After many years of study subsidised by the New Zealand taxpayer, Maeve Hume-Nixon recently qualified as a public health specialist, but may yet end up going overseas.

“I actually thought last year that I would have to go to Australia, where I would be paid another $100,000 minimum, because there were no jobs for me here, basically.

“In the end, I managed to get an emergency extension to my contract and this has continued, but I don’t have security and it’s a pretty frustrating position to be in.”

Neurologist Dr Maas Mollenhauer said he was not able to access the tests he needed to provide care for his patients.

“I’ve seen patients that I have sent for urgent imaging, but they didn’t receive it, and then I got an email from one of my colleagues who was on call, telling me that patient had rocked up to the Emergency Department and, basically, the front half of their skull was full of brain tumour.”

Cancer patients waiting too long
Medical oncologist Dr Sharon Pattison said the health system had reached the point where it was so starved of people and resources, it had become “inefficient”.

“Everyone is waiting for everything, so everything takes longer, and we are waiting until people get seriously ill, before we do anything about it.”

The government’s “faster cancer treatment time” target — 90 percent of patients receiving cancer management within 31 days of the decision to treat — would not give the true picture of what was happening for patients, she said.

“For instance, if I have someone with a potential diagnosis of cancer, there are so many points at which they are waiting — waiting for scan, waiting for a biopsy, waiting for a radiologist to report the scan to show us where to get the biopsy.

“That radiologist may be overseas, so if I want to talk to that specialist I can’t do that. Then the wait for a pathologist to report on the biopsy can now take up to 6-8 weeks.

“We know that, for some people with cancer, if you wait for that long before we can even make your treatment plan, we’re going to make your outcomes worse.

“The whole system is at the point where we are making people more unwell, because we can’t do what we should be doing for them in the framework that we need to.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

When New Zealand’s opposition National Party’s transport spokesperson, Simeon Brown, questioned the logic of bilingual traffic signs, he seemed to echo his leader Christopher Luxon’s earlier misgivings about the now prevalent use of te reo Māori in government departments.

Genuine concern or political signalling in an election year? After all, Luxon himself has expressed interest in learning te reo, and also encouraged its use when he was CEO of Air New Zealand.

He even sought to trademark “Kia Ora” as the title of the airline’s in-flight magazine.

And for his part, Brown has no problem with Māori place names on road signs. His concern is that important messaging about safety or directions should be readily understood. “Signs need to be clear,” he said.

“We all speak English, and they should be in English.” Adding more words, he believes, is simply confusing.

It’s important to take Brown at his word, then, with a new selection of proposed bilingual signs now out for public consultation. Given the National Party’s enthusiastic embrace of AI to generate pre-election advertising imagery, one obvious place to start is with ChatGPT, which tells us:

Bilingual traffic signs, which display information in two or more languages, are generally not considered a driver hazard. In fact, bilingual signage is often implemented to improve safety and ensure that drivers of different language backgrounds can understand and follow the traffic regulations.

ChatGPT also suggests that by providing information about speed limits, directions and warnings, bilingual traffic signs “accommodate diverse communities and promote road safety for all drivers”.

‘They should be in English’: National to ditch te reo Māori traffic signs https://t.co/7FGYyQDrPu

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) May 26, 2023

Safety and culture
With mounting concern over AI’s potential existential threat to human survival, however, it’s probably best we don’t take the bot’s word for it.

Fortunately, government transport agency Waka Kotahi has already examined the use of bilingual traffic signs in 19 countries across the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. It’s 2021 report states:

The use of bilingual traffic signage is common around the world and considered “standard” in the European Union. Culture, safety and commerce appear to be the primary impetuses behind bilingual signage.

Given Brown’s explicit preference for the use of English, it’s instructive that in the UK itself, the Welsh, Ulster Scots and Scots Gaelic languages appear alongside English on road signs in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

More to the point, on the basis of the evidence it reviewed, Waka Kotahi concluded that — providing other important design considerations are attended to — bilingual traffic signs can both improve safety and respond to cultural aspirations:

In regions of Aotearoa New Zealand where people of Māori descent are over-represented in vehicle crash statistics, or where they represent a large proportion of the local population, bilingual traffic signage may impart benefits in terms of reducing harm on our road network.

‘One people’
Politically, however, the problem with a debate over bilingual road signs is that it quickly becomes another skirmish in the culture wars — echoing the common catchcry of those opposed to greater biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand: “We are one people”.

It’s a loaded phrase, originally attributed to the Crown’s representative Lieutenant Governor William Hobson, who supposedly said “he iwi tahi tātou” (we are one people) at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.

Whether or not he said any such thing is up for debate. William Colenso, who was at Waitangi on the day and who reported Hobson’s words, thought he had.

But Colenso’s account was published 50 years after the events in question (and just nine years before he died aged 89).

Either way, the assertion has since come to be favoured by those to whom the notion of cultural homogeneity appeals. It’s a common response to the increasing public visibility of te ao Māori (the Māori world).

But being “one people” means other things become singular too: one law, one science, one language, one system. In other words, a non-Māori system, the one many of us take for granted as simply the way things are.

Any suggestion that system might incorporate or coexist with aspects of other systems — indeed might benefit from them — tends to come up against the kind of resistance we see to such things as bilingual road signs.

Fretful sleepers
The discomfort many New Zealanders still feel with the use of te reo Māori in public settings brings to mind Bill Pearson’s famous 1952 essay, Fretful Sleepers.

In it, Pearson reflects on the anxiety that can seep unbidden into the lives of those who would like to live in a “wishfully untroubled world”, but who nonetheless sense things are not quite right out here on the margins of the globe.

Pearson lived in a very different New Zealand. But he had his finger on the same fear and defensiveness that can cause people to fret about the little things (like bilingual signs) when there are so many more consequential things to disrupt our sleep.

Anyway, Simeon Brown and his fellow fretful sleepers appear to be on the wrong side of history. Evidence suggests most New Zealanders would like to see more te reo Māori in their lives, not less.

Two-thirds would like te reo taught as a core subject in primary schools, and 56 percent think “signage should be in both te reo Māori and English”.

If the experience in other parts of the world is anything to go by, bilingual signage will be just another milestone on the road a majority seem happy to be on.

Dr Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Massey University.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz