Wanted: doctors & nurses

It was not especially surprising when Minister of Health Andrew Little recently resisted using the word “crisis” about the present condition of the health system. Governments are traditionally reluctant to acknowledge the c-word on their watch, even when everyone else is saying it.

- RUSSELL BROWN

And perhaps Little has some sort of point: our hospitals were spared the outright nightmare that some other countries experienced in the first year of the pandemic, when there were no vaccines or antivirals. Late last year, a World Health Organisation paper estimated that the Covid death toll among healthcare workers globally was between 80,000 and 180,000.

It is also true that there is a global shortage of nurses and doctors. As the Financial Times observed recently, the WHO declared a staffing shortfall of nearly six million nurses even before the pandemic. Since then, alongside those who have, unthinkably, died on the job, many more have succumbed to burnout and left their professions.

A report from the McKinsey consultancy last year found that a third of nurses surveyed in the US, UK, Singapore, Japan and France said they were likely to quit within the next year. A more recent McKinsey report, focusing on the US, estimated that America would be short of as many as 450,000 nurses – or between 10-20% of the required number– by 2025.