Newshub can reveal health workers in Southland - including the mental health staff - have been given access to counselling sessions to deal with the stress of a hiring freeze.
It comes the day after the Government set itself targets to improve mental health services.
Yesterday the Prime Minister promised to improve the state of our mental health services.
"As Prime Minister improving mental health services in New Zealand is a major focus for my Government," Christopher Luxon said.
But right now the health system is in a hiring freeze on all non-frontline roles.
"What's happened there is that there's no blanket freeze. What it is is the actual decisions about local hiring has actually been given and devolved back to the local health authorities so they can actually tailor it to the regions that they're in rather than doing that centrally out of Wellington," Luxon said.
The process is taking its toll on staff. Newshub's obtained an email from the head of Health NZ's Southern group director Hamish Brown telling staff to "seek support if they need it through provided counselling sessions".
"We have a fantastic people in our health care system and it's often the system that's let them down. And that's why I want to see better delivery, better support, better focus on front-line services in our healthcare system," Luxon said.
A Southern mental health worker - who wanted anonymity - called the counselling sessions "laughable". And they said that frontline services were not affected by the hiring freeze was "a blatant lie".
"It looks like a lot of gaslighting going on from senior management and ministers saying that there's no frontline cuts," said Labour MP Ingrid Leary.
"Let me be really clear - this is a Government that's spending more on health than we've ever spent before, we're determined to have a world-class healthcare system. We know it's complex. We know we've got workforce challenges," countered Luxon.
In a statement, Health NZ reiterated the pause on hiring did not affect patient-facing roles and thousands of clinical staff continued to be recruited.
