Labour's health spokesperson is defending her party's decision to announce a policy aimed at fixing the country's healthcare shortage on the same day thousands went on strike.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins announced on Wednesday if elected the party would commit $924 million over 10 years to train 335 more doctors every year from 2027.
But on the same day, more than 5000 senior doctors and 100 dentists went back to the picket line, after pay talks with Te Whatu Ora failed last week.
Labour's health spokesperson Dr Ayesha Verrall told AM on Thursday it's nothing more than a coincidence the announcement was made on the day doctors went on strike.
"Look, obviously the Government doesn't determine when the senior doctors strike, but of course, we've been aware we want to strengthen that health workforce for some time," she said.
"We had the plan for Te Whatu Ora that we announced back in July with a number of actions over the short term but we really want to see that long-term training pipeline for domestically trained doctors and that's what our announcement was about."
Doctors have been calling for better pay and working conditions to stop the haemorrhaging of health workers to higher-paying countries like Australia. One doctor told Newshub it's hard to compete when New Zealand salaries are so far behind.
Executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists Sarah Dalton said the offer of salary increases of between 7 and 12.9 percent over 17 months is not acceptable.
"It's not good enough," she said. "We are losing doctors every week to Australia."
It's even got to a point where an ED worker believes New Zealand's healthcare system has progressed from being in a "crisis" to a "catastrophe".
The former head of Te Whatu Ora Rob Campbell told Newshub Labour's proposal to train hundreds more doctors is a policy that's the direct result of industrial action.
He said the fact doctors are still protesting for better pay is appalling.
But Dr Verrall defended Labour's record in the health sector saying her party has a "strong track record" of increasing pay.
"Every year we have to increase the amount we spend on health to make sure inflation doesn't eat away at wages. Labour has a really strong track record of doing that. We've increased the funding of the health system by between 40-50 percent just in the six years we've been in government," she said.
"National never did that, when they were in government, they increased health funding, but it didn't keep up with inflation it put downward pressure on wages. I'm really clear our track record and our commitment on health coming into this election will be one that supports wage growth for our doctors and nurses and all of our clinicians."
Dr Verrall told AM the reason Labour announced its policy on Wednesday when the shortage has been an issue for some time is because the party is now focusing on training domestic doctors rather than relying on immigration.
She told AM co-host Laura Tupou it has been about 10 years since New Zealand increased its domestically trained doctors.
"After the last National government where health funding was really suppressed we wanted to grow our medical workforce and we have," she said.
"We've had 2000 doctors added to our public health system over that time. So we have been growing our medical workforce but what the pandemic showed us is that we have become overreliant on using immigration as a way to do that. So now we're just committing to switch to having much more domestically trained doctors."
Watch the full interview with Dr Ayesha Verrall in the video above.
