95bFM Is the new health funding boost sufficient?
1 April, 2026
Interview by Castor Chacko, adapted by Chloe Porter
The government has announced a $25 million funding boost for our health sector, including 378 new roles. The government says this boost will support our health sector during the winter illness period.
Health unions, while grateful for the extra funding, believe core issues within the health sector are still being neglected. The chief executive of the New Zealand Health Union, Paul Goulter, spoke to 95bFM’s The Wire to explain the scale of the problem and how the boost will help.
Goulter says the government haven’t fulfilled the promises they’ve made across the entire health sector. For Plunket, hospices, general practitioners, hospitals, and Māori and iwi providers, all promises of cutting bureaucracy, hiring additional staff, and reducing overcrowding have fallen short. “The under-resourcing of our health system is really creating a crisis.”
Goulter says that “nurses are absolutely central to good health care,” reaching across many different areas in providing health services. The shortages, therefore, pose significant risks.
“Nurses are frustrated that wherever they work, they struggle to provide the level of care that their training knows needs to be provided to New Zealanders, and that just can't be done because they're understaffed and under-resourced.”
Every nurse is impacted by the government's refusal to fund the health system at the level it needs, as we look at nurses in aged residential care and also in primary health. This is what is called “a pay parity gap, the pay those nurses receive is significantly less than in the hospitals, making people leave those nursing careers for hospital jobs.”
Goulter acknowledges that any increase in staff is a positive, but we need to recognise if it's an adequate number. From hospital surveys, the Health Union found there was an average of 580 nurses short per shift in hospitals. And as that continues to worsen, the government's $25 million and 378 new staff member boost will still not be sufficient — especially with the demand for nurses tripling during the winter months between April and July.
When looking towards policy changes and potential solutions, Goulter emphasises “the need for a workforce policy that's going to deliver the right number of trained nurses at the right time”. However, he says “the government appears completely incapable of doing that. The number of nurses is being driven by budget rather than need.”
“The serious binary issue between nurses and the government is that the government is only interested in budget numbers, and nurses are interested in the care that New Zealand citizens need and deserve. Actually, the sad story is that this government will continue to promote the primacy of budget over the primacy of needed care.”
Furthermore, there are additional costs in not having an adequate number of staff in hospitals, such as patients dismissing managing symptoms due to long emergency room and appointment wait times. Later, the medical issue re-presents and has worsened. The cost of care increases because the system wasn’t funded to address the patients' needs at the start, creating a “magnifying effect.”
“That's with GPs and urgent clinics on that level because if we can get the care to patients at the very first time they present to the health system, we can actually ensure that they're being cared for and the costs are being controlled.”
