After years of underfunding, staff shortages and
expanding waiting lists —conditions worsened by both
Labour and National governments and enabled by the trade
union bureaucracy—New Zealand’s public health system is
in a deepening crisis.
The desperate situation facing
patients and staff has been highlighted by media reports
over the holiday period. Witnesses at Wellington
Hospital’s Emergency Department (ED) in the capital city
told Stuff of “chaos” after the ward went into its most
critical “code red” status four times over five hours on
the night of January 20. A code red is instigated when
patient demand outstrips available staff and beds.
One
person said she saw 7 to 9 patients waiting in beds in
corridors while hearing staff tell people there was “no
space for anyone extra.” “Patients were yelling, ‘oh,
I’ve been here for eight hours now, this is not
fair,’” she said. A nurse told Stuff that 74 patients
were still in ED the next morning with 41 not seen by staff.
“We are always in a code red situation, we are never out
of it really. As nurses we just learn to get on and do the
job, we are regularly abused,” she said.
According
to a recent Official Information Act release Wellington’s
ED recorded 575 code reds, averaging nearly twice a day,
between January and October last year. Only about half the
patients were treated and moved on within six hours, the
government’s supposed target. More than 3,200 patients
left without being treated—around 10 people a
day.
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Radio NZ reported on January 5 that Health NZ
(HNZ) had been forced to apologise to a woman who spent over
11 hours in severe pain at the Wellington ED before
Christmas but was never seen by a doctor. The day she
arrived the department reached 256 percent occupancy, one of
the busiest days in recent years.
The woman said after
11 hours the charge nurse told her they were “struggling
to see everyone in a reasonable timeframe because of staff
constraints, and that even if they could see me, there
wasn’t a place to put me, there was no space.” She left
after 2.00 a.m. the next morning after being told it
wasn’t clear when she could be fully admitted into the
hospital.
An ED nurse told Radio NZ; “We are trying
to run between patients left, right and centre and we are
trying to look after more patients than we can at that given
moment and that’s when sub-optimal care happens, that’s
when mistakes can happen.”
Health Minister Simeon
Brown denounced the “unacceptable” situation at
Wellington but blamed the hospital and staff, declaring it
was “one of the lowest-performing emergency departments in
the country.” In fact, EDs everywhere are over-run due to
the chronic shortage of doctors and exorbitant costs of GP
visits. According to Labour’s Health spokesperson Ayesha
Verrall, 650,000 people, 13 percent of the population,
cannot afford to see their local doctor, a situation Labour
is equally responsible for.
The crisis is nationwide.
On January 5, it was reported that the urgent care clinic at
Kenepuru Hospital was without a doctor overnight between
10.30 p.m. and 7.00 a.m. due to the rostered doctor calling
in sick with nobody available to cover the shift. A
nurse-only overnight provider in regional Napier was closed
from New Year’s Day to January 4, in addition to six
nights in December and four in November.
Kenepuru
Hospital services 120,000 people in the outer Wellington
working class areas of Porirua and the Kāpiti Coast. In
2024, HNZ signed a contract with telehealth company
Emergency Consult to provide advice overnight if there was
no doctor on site. But telehealth would only be offered in
the clinic if it was “clinically appropriate.” The
Napier clinic was also considered for a telehealth service
until locals protested against it.
On January 20, Van
Muollo told Stuff he had to wait 10 days for an operation
after being rushed to the Tauranga Hospital in pain by
ambulance. The 44-year was told his gallbladder needed
urgent removal, and he was repeatedly put on nil-by-mouth in
preparation for surgery, only to be told at the end of each
day it would be postponed.
A spokesman for HNZ’s Bay
of Plenty operations said the area’s Department of General
Surgery was “experiencing significant pressures due to
high levels of acute demand” and all eight theatres at
Tauranga Hospital “are actively utilised.” Waiting lists
everywhere are bursting. Over 200,000 people are currently
waiting for their first specialist appointment, with over
77,000 more than four months.
The National Party-led
government’s 2025–26 budget allocated $NZ13 billion for
defence over four years, but health increased by just 4.77
percent ($1.37 billion) amid high inflation—insufficient
to address the crisis of unmet need. Some 2,000 sector jobs
were cut over the past year. In December, Brown ordered
hospitals and health services to find more than $NZ500
million in “efficiencies,” on top of an existing $2
billion annual cost-saving target.
Amid the drastic
shortage of nurses, only 47 percent, or about 800 graduating
trainee nurses in 2025 had secured jobs at the end of the
year, similar to 45 and 52 percent over the previous two
intakes.
The crisis is the product of decades of
austerity measures under successive governments, including
Labour. Thousands of nurses, doctors, ambulance personnel
and lab technicians have over recent years taken industrial
action over low pay, understaffing and deplorable conditions
for both staff and patients.
Their struggles have
repeatedly been sold out by the trade union bureaucracy.
Following a mass strike by more than 100,000 healthcare
workers and teachers on October 23 last year, the Public
Service Association, the NZ Nurses Organisation and
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists are all seeking
to negotiate and impose deals that will not keep up with the
cost of living nor address the staffing crisis.
The
government is exploiting the crisis to systematically expand
the private sector. Last June, Brown directed HNZ to
establish long-term, 10-year contracts with for-profit
private providers to increase capacity for elective
surgeries. Over 10,000 surgeries were outsourced in 2025.
The strategy includes $50 million to boost procedures for
conditions like hip replacements and cataracts, with a goal
of 21,000 extra operations. The scheme would “provide
clear investment signals” to the private sector, Brown
said.
Meanwhile Winston Peters, leader of the
far-right populist NZ First Party in the governing coalition
has praised the US withdrawal from the World Health
Organisation (WHO), suggesting NZ should discontinue its
funding. With NZ already recording low and inequitable
immunization rates, departure from the WHO would vastly
increase the exposure of the working class, in particular,
to pandemics and transmissible diseases.
The defence
of public health is fundamentally incompatible with
capitalism, which subordinates social needs to profit. A
decent, properly resourced health system can only be
achieved on the basis of a socialist program. All private
contracts or transfers to profit operators should be
cancelled. The wealth hoarded by the billionaires must be
expropriated and military spending must be ended in order to
redirect funding to hospitals, schools and other essential
services.
The health crisis is above all a global
issue: Workers in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the US
and elsewhere face identical cuts and privatisations. Health
workers and their supporters need to establish rank and file
committees—independent and opposed to the pro-capitalist
unions—to connect internationally, coordinate strikes and
oppose the machinations of capitalist governments and the
entire private health industry.
By John Braddock,
Socialist Equality Group
30 January 2026
Original url:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/30/fvga-j30.html
