The first female premier of a Solomon Islands province is appealing to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to help her country manage covid-19 in the community.
People travelling between Honiara and Isabel Province were being tested for the virus at four testing centres, and if they test positive they were isolated at a makeshift centre.
The Isabel Premier, Rhoda Sikilabu, said she was desperate for funding to make improvements to the isolation centres because “they’re filling up and are run down”.
“I really, really need support. We have no place to … isolate these people,” Sikilabu said.
She wants New Zealand to provide funding for improvements for the centres.
“I, as a woman and a mother, I have so many worries and concerns for families offloading with babies, children,” she said.
“I really, really need support in covid. Please I would like to appeal to the Prime Minister.”
Focus on environmental and women’s issues
Sikilabu plans to focus on environmental and women’s issues, and is hopeful of bringing changes to her region as well as transform old mindsets.
She wants women to have authority to speak about their land and property in regards to resources.
“Reforestation is one of the priorities that I will tackle and maybe I can impact more on how women can address or say more on their property, their land ownership,” she said.
”The environment is very, very important to women just now.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand does not have enough nurses or ICU beds, warn healthcare figures as their workforce braces for omicron.
The College of Critical Care Nurses told RNZ Morning Report that the country was currently short of at least 90 ICU beds if there was a major omicron outbreak.
Chair Tania Mitchell said intensive care capacity had been a sticking point for other countries during the outbreak, and New Zealand was under-prepared.
“We know compared to other areas in the OECD that, even for business as usual, we have a low number of intensive care beds per head compared to other countries, and that puts us on the back foot going into this.”
She said more beds were always welcome, and there was a $644 million increase in funding to hospitals and ICUs from the government to cope with covid-19 that was announced in December.
But there was real concern it would not be enough, and there were not enough intensive care nurses.
“In intensive care we’re actually struggling to cope with business as usual,” Mitchell said.
“That’s to do with bed numbers, but most importantly nursing numbers — you can build new building, and increase more beds much easier than you can create the nursing resources.”
It is likely more cardiac and cancer patients would have surgery delayed, to help free up ICU beds.
Urgent work on immigration could help, she said, and nurses wanting to come to or remain in New Zealand should be prioritised, and assistance with shifting here made available.
Quarter of nursing workforce could be out of action Nurses and other health workers becoming sick with omicron as an outbreak spreads was going to strain healthcare provisions, Nurses Organisation industrial officer Glenda Alexander said.
“If we lost a quarter of them even, at any one time … which is predicted, it is going to put immense strain on already tight staffing levels.
Nurses representative Glenda Alexander … “If we lost a quarter of [nurses] even, at any one time … which is predicted, it is going to put immense strain on already tight staffing levels.” Image: RNZ/NZNO
“But it’s not just hospital nurses, our workforce who work in aged care, primary health care, those people on the frontline doing vaccinations and taking tests — it’s right across.
“If you imagine a quarter — at least, of those people not being able to be a work, because it won’t just be their own health, it’s the health of their families as well, that they have to address.”
Alexander said nurses were already carrying the burden of long understaffing problems, and they would likely have to prioritise only urgent and necessary work — “just life preserving services only, so no elective surgery”.
“If we’d planned for a pandemic five years ago, as we were predicting nursing shortages, that would have helped immensely right now, but we can’t actually grow [nurses] as quickly as we need right now. It is a stressful situation.”
Māori vaccination rates still a concern to health sector Māori health providers are in a race to vaccinate children and boost adult immunisations before omicron spreads widely.
They expect the number of people getting booster shots and vaccinations for their children to increase now people are coming back from holiday.
Māngere health provider Turuki Health chief executive Te Puea Winiata told Morning Report many people were working on pulling the rate up.
Ministry of Health data shows 93 percent of the wider Counties Manukau DHB population is fully vaccinated, but Māori lag behind at 84 percent.
Manurewa, Papakura and parts of Māngere were particularly low, Winiata said, and mobile vaccination clinics were being used to help reach some of those areas.
“What we’ve done is to focus on particular suburbs or particular areas in those suburbs, to do a bit of a boost to those areas.
“On an ongoing basis [we’re using] communication, messaging to our communities, making sure that we understand the issues on whānau perhaps not coming forward.”
Vaccine rollout still ‘good numbers’
Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins earlier told Morning Report there were still good numbers of people coming forward for vaccinations, particularly for boosters, but the summer break had slowed that rate for all New Zealanders.
Winiata said staff have reported that vaccination slow-down is now recovering for Māori in her area.
“We had a big surge of people getting boosters before Christmas. And interestingly the surge in weekends before Christmas is now reversed — lots of people are coming in during the week and fewer at the weekend.
“But … in the week of the 17th when a number of people were coming back to work that was a bit of a leverage for people to think about being vaccinated, who weren’t.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Intensive care units and hospitals are getting a boost of hundreds of millions of dollars as the country moves to the covid-19 traffic light system.
Minister of Health Andrew Little announced today the government would spend $100 million upgrading buildings and facilities and $544 million for operating costs, including staffing to prepare for when covid is expected to be widespread in the community next year.
He said he had asked hospitals to identify ways of quickly increasing their intensive care beds — even though there was more than enough capacity than was likely to be needed.
“But as the country shifts to the traffic light system, we need to make sure we can cope with the unexpected,” he said.
Four initial projects were announced.
The biggest was at West Auckland’s Waitākere Hospital, which had been given $65.1 million to build space for 30 new ward beds, six ICU beds and two negative pressure rooms.
It currently had no ICU, sending patients to North Shore Hospital instead.
Its district health board was getting a further $5 million to covert eight existing elective surgery beds to surge intensive care beds.
Bay of Plenty was given $15.5 million to create two more ICU beds and 4 high dependency unit beds. Canterbury was getting $12 million for 12 ICU beds.
‘Underdone’ before covid
Little told RNZ Morning Report: “Even well before covid, we were underdone when it comes to ICU capacity, so this has always been a thing that we had to do better on and the covid pandemic has obviously shone a light on capacity issues and and even though this most recent outbreak, we’ve actually coped remarkably well with the increasing daily case numbers, ICU capacity has been available.
“We’ve hovered between about five and I think it topped out at 11 cases at any one time in ICU.
“With the traffic light system, covid is going to move around the country. We need to know that we’ve done everything we can to maximize ICU capacity.”
Of the projects announced yesterday, three will be available in the next six months – the other is a “couple of years away”, Little said.
“These things take a little time to bring on. Early this year I had said to those responsible for putting things together, if there’s any opportunities we can take to accelerate ICU projects, let’s bring those on. This is the product of that.”
Little said Waitakere, Tauranga and Christchurch were getting more DHB capacity because they had ICU plans that could be accelerated.
ICU beds in New Zealand. Graphic: RNZ
Long-standing concern
Intensive care doctors and nurses have long worried about how intensive care service around the country would cope when covid became truly endemic, saying the government was overestimating how much capacity there was.
That was because they would have to care for people with covid-19 on top of all the other usual care, for example, people who had been in car accidents, had a heart attack or who were recovering from certain serious surgeries.
They have said there is not enough capacity to cope without the high standard of care falling or some planned operations being put off.
The biggest barrier was not physical beds and equipment, but the nurses needed to staff these.
The College of Critical Care Nurses estimated the country’s hospitals were short of about 90 already and said urgent moves were needed to recruit nurses from overseas, train more here, and pay those already working better.
There were not yet details on how the new funding would help to fix the problem.
‘Delighted’ over funding
Intensive care doctor and Intensive Care Society spokesperson, Andrew Stapleton, told Morning Report the society was “delighted”.
“In the 70 years since there’s been an intensive care in New Zealand, there’s never been any targeted money in a package like this and there’s the promise of more to come, so we’re very hopeful that this is the beginning of moving in the right direction,” Stapleton said.
“It will (make a difference) in the places it’s targeted towards, so it is targeted and particularly the big win from this is Waitākere.
“So we talk about intensive care beds per 100,000. There’s roughly four for the whole of New Zealand. Waitākere’s got a population of 600,000 and no intensive care beds, and this is something we’ve been campaigning for some time.
“So, they’re going to get six intensive care beds and a 30-bed inpatient ward, and this is great news for that region.”
Intensive care beds costed about $1 million a year to run because of the staffing costs, Stapleton said.
“That gives you an idea that that is a significant boost.”
‘We’re not complaining’
While the money could have come sooner, “at this point we’re not complaining”.
Regarding covid-19, the big test was yet to come, he said.
“It’s easy to forget that Auckland, where the vast majority of covid has been, has been in level 3 lockdown until today, so what happens two weeks from now is going to be interesting to see.”
Little had earlier said 1400 nurses had completed a 4-hour online course to give them skills to help as a surge workforce if needed.
But those in the field said they would be able to provide care around the edges at best.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
