Good on the police for their historic pay outcome but what does it say about this NSW government when it tells nurses and midwives they should be grateful for what they are. 

Hypocrisy is on full show when we compare the recent decision by the Minns Government to grant police officers (72 per cent male workforce) pay increases of up to 39 per cent while offering nurses and midwives (86.7 per cent female workforce) a fraction of that amount.

Teachers, paramedics and now police have all received historic pay increases, while the state’s largest female- dominated workforce is, once again, left behind and forgotten.

We can’t make the trade-offs or find the savings to fund our pay rise like other unions have. They simply aren’t there. The health budget is already stretched beyond its limits. We need more money to be put into health.

Recent wage agreements with other unions will further exacerbate the gender pay gap in NSW which has now risen three years in a row to 6.2 per cent, the highest in the last decade, and in contradiction to the government’s professed objectives.

This blatant undervaluing of our professions is not only profoundly unjust, it is also driving a dangerous staffing crisis that jeopardises the safety and quality of healthcare across New South Wales.

The government is in denial about the state of the NSW public health system (PHS). This denial of reality leads to

a wilful neglect which is running our public health system into the ground.

Drastic measures need to be made to stop the loss of nurses and midwives out of the PHS. The recruitment

and retention needed to fulfil the government’s own objectives of introducing ratios cannot be funded by savings. The government needs to find more money for health.

Rather than address workloads and burnout in our hospitals through improved working conditions, we have officials from the Ministry of Health denigrating ratios, telling the Special Commission of Healthcare Funding that the system is locked into “ratios of high cost, high scope practitioners and rigid turf wars”.

What we need is new money to put into the health budget. This is why we commissioned the Deloitte report, which pointed to extra money that

could be claimed from federal funding and initiatives that improved patient care and generated cost efficiencies.

These initiatives were intended to generate real dollars to support a pay rise for nurses and midwives, yet the NSW Government rejected it.

Both the Queensland and Victoria Labor governments found the money to fund ratios and a significant pay rise for nurses and midwives. NSW can do the same.

MORE INDEPENDENT EVIDENCE THAT BACKS OUR CASE

Recent independent reports reinforce our analysis of the dire state of the public health system.

The national workforce report on midwifery warned of the increasing numbers of midwives looking to exit the sector due to work-related issues including burnout, understaffing, not feeling valued and poor skill mix.

The report makes it clear that to secure the required workforce, we need to encourage midwives to work more hours than they currently do. They won’t do that unless we fix the structural issues of pay, workloads and support.

The federal government inquiry into the response to COVID-19 also highlighted the large backlogs in elective surgery from the pandemic period which inflates demand coupled

with the workforce shortages from burnout that have impeded any semblance of “recovery to business as usual”.

Other actors see clearly that what we are arguing is transparently true.

The Sydney Morning Herald recognised that nurses and midwives “bravely pushed for better nurse-to-patient ratios as their number one priority to ensure improved service delivery and stop the flight interstate caused by high levels of exhaustion and lower wages”.

The SMH slammed Premier Minns who had “chosen to conflate their demands for better ratios and more money and said they could not have both. But they are separate issues. The government sees the sense of rewarding police to attract recruits and retain experience but is blind to the same plight facing nurses and midwives, instead penalising them for wanting better care for patients”.

WITHOUT ACTION THINGS WILL GET WORSE

The figures are increasingly dire. Eight in 10 nurses and midwives in NSW are considering moving interstate in the next five years, according to the 2024 Unions NSW survey.

This is hardly surprising. In other states like Victoria and Queensland wages are 18 per cent higher and conditions are better.

The actual number of nurses and midwives in the state dropped by 412 with even more moving interstate, in the year to 30 June. This simply cannot continue.

The government keeps banging on about delivering ratios, but it cannot and will not fulfil its ratio commitment without delivering competitive and attractive rates of pay to recruit the nurses and midwives needed to fulfil safe staffing levels.■