National Telehealth Service Clinicians And Advisors To Strike For 24 Hours

NZNO and PSA members working for the Government-funded national telehealth services run by Whakarongorau Aotearoa, will strike for 24 hours from 3.00pm Friday 15 September to 3.00pm Saturday 16 September.

Whakarongorau Chief Employee Experience Officer Anna Campbell said today; "The majority of our 35 services will be available, however, there will be significant delays in responding to calls due to reduced staffing. We are prioritising services that support people who are in immediate danger, and the team will focus - as always - on doing one safe call at a time."

During the strike, all non-phone channels (text, webchat, and email) options will be unavailable across all services, and four of our services will be entirely unavailable - the Gambling Helpline, the Alcohol Drug Helpline, the national sexual harm helpline Safe to talk, and the Elder Abuse Response Service."

Anna Campbell added; "We aim to pay our staff as much as we can. We do all we can to recognise the enormous, literally unseen work done by our clinicians and advisors. We made an offer to the union that reflected what funding we have received and what we have been able to afford. Whakarongorau has not been funded to offer more. We respect our kaimahi expressing their dissatisfaction and this strike action reflects the lack of value that our staff feel is placed on them as frontline telehealth professionals."

"While we have been focussing on keeping essential telehealth services available for the people of Aotearoa, others have been focussed on our organisation’s financial surpluses. It is really important to note that Whakarongorau Aotearoa is a social enterprise and has reinvested previous surpluses to keep our organisation operational, sustainable, relevant, and focussed on equitable health outcomes."

Between 2015 and 2020 the surpluses generated within Whakarongorau Aotearoa were used to pay back the loan from our owners ProCare and Pegasus Health, required to create the National Telehealth Service. Since then, reinvestment has included replacing the telephony platform, the development of ‘Healthline online’ to maximise time for clinical interactions, and tikanga cultural and diversity training for all staff.

Anna Campbell said; "We know how important these telehealth services are - these are services that 1 in 3 Kiwis used in the last 12 months. During this period Whakarongorau responded to over 2.2 million contacts, connecting with nearly 1.6 million individual people. We operate across the motu and are essentially the largest emergency department in Aotearoa. In a 24-hour period across all our services we would normally support around 4,000 calls and more than 300 non-phone contacts."

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