Released Friday 27 September 2024
After a lot of fanfare and involvement from the Minister for Health during the extraordinarily long development of the WA Health Workforce Strategy, WA Health has quietly released the final strategy document online yesterday and notified staff.
The Minister’s foreword itself focuses on the need for collective action to ensure a sufficient, supported and sustainable health workforce – an outrageous claim when our members have been fighting tooth and nail for WA Health to come to the table and do just this.
The language in the Minister’s foreword could very well have been pulled from the correspondence our members continue to send WA Health and the Minister in the hope of a securing a fair Third Offer – the need to “care for an investment in building the capacity of capability of current staff” and “attract and retain future staff” to ensure WA Health have the skills and expertise needed to meet the demand for health services.
It is no surprise the Government has released this quietly even though it’s been several years in the making – it lays out the exact issues and the need for reform our members have been fighting to get WA Health to engage with.
Our frontline and supporting public health workforce understands better than anyone the need to build and retain a health workforce with the capacity and capability to provide quality care to WA patients. Yet their requests for the fair pay, targeted improvements to conditions, and the implementation of overdue workforce reforms that are necessary to attract and retain staff, continue to be ignored by Health.
Despite significant mention of the need for greater professional development throughout the strategy, our members’ request for the introduction of professional development leave and support for the technical and administrative workforce continues to be knocked back by Health. In addition, all the experienced professionals in Allied Health and the Health Sciences are still unable to access any allowance to support their required professional development.
Just this morning our Medical Imaging Technologist workforce at Fiona Stanley Hospital walked off the job because Health has done nothing to assist with the serious issues they have had attracting and retaining staff for years, unable to compete with a private sector offering more money, less shift work and manageable workloads. Patients are now waiting days for critical scans because WA Health does not have the staff or equipment to serve the number of public health patients we are expected to assist.
Critical, highly qualified Medical Imaging staff have walked off the job at every Perth public hospital this week, in desperate protest at the lack of action.
There is an urgent, overwhelming and straightforward need for the State Government to invest now in the public health workforce.
HSUWA members have put forward claims for simple improvements and sensible workforce reforms that will help fix these deep-set problems and deliver dividends for the sustainability of WA’s public health system.
Strategies are important, and this workforce strategy would be very helpful if it really was intended to provide the foundations for change. Western Australian public health staff and patients deserve more than another dust-gathering strategy that isn’t truly supported. We would expect a 180-degree turnaround in their approach to HSUWA member’s claims, if they truly believe in what they have said, in the strategy.
HSUWA members are the workforce. They have proposed real solutions to the serious attraction and retention challenges of the WA public health workforce that Health can implement, without more delay.
The Cook Government must invest now in the WA public health workforce and make a fair, respectful Third Offer to HSUWA members.
An investment now will deliver dividends for WA health’s future and sustainability.
An investment now provides the recognition and respect that our dedicated workforce deserves.
