NPAQ President Margaret Gilbert and local NPAQ representative, Bron Witeri, met with our Gladstone members recently to listen.
What we heard was shocking, maternity services were shut down despite the growth in the region, leaving women to travel at least 90 minutes to the nearest maternity facility.
There have also been many breaches of your Enterprise Agreement, managers ignoring staff fatigue, rosters understaffed, they are refusing to provide mandated breaks and more.
Staff are leaving an organisation that they can no longer trust. We hear that many nurses are voting with their feet changing to casual to avoid the bureaucracy and the onerous shifts that some permanent staff are being put on at short notice.
Following this Gladstone meeting with Bron Witeri, NPAQ representative and our nurse members, NPAQ took action. We immediately engaged with the HHS CEO in Rockhampton to draw these risks to the attention of management in a positive way. Read the letter here.
Local Gladstone politicians got nowhere at a recent town meeting. We did, and we will continue to advocate for our members.
The day after our letter was received was the day the decision was made to return the maternity services to Gladstone. Yet what management has done is too little, they must immediately reinstate full maternity services and support for the region before we see another “Mackay”.
The fact is our regional Hospital and Health Services are dependent on faceless managers in Brisbane who strip funds away for these much-needed services with no understanding of local wants and needs. If each HHS was truly independent and decisions were made by local managers who were accountable for what they did, we would see results. Our Hospital and Health Services must change, to be truly autonomous with local nurses on the local board.
More needs to be done in Gladstone and in your HHS. When you talk to NPAQ we act.
This problem was bought to our attention by Gladstone nurses. The solutions were suggested by Gladstone nurses, Gladstone nurses will be implementing the new systems and Gladstone nurses will be making sure they stay in place for Gladstone residents.
The Queensland Health system is broken and so is employee morale and trust.
Health reform will never go ahead until the government goes local to give our members and regions like Gladstone a fair go.