As before, the ongoing strikes continue to cause delays in critical clinical laboratory blood testing and surgical procedures
After seven months of failed negotiations, New Zealand’s blood workers, clinical laboratory technicians, and medical scientists, are once again back on strike. According to Star News, hundreds of lab workers walked off the job on May 31, 2024, with another longer walkout planned for June to protest pay disparities.
New Zealand Blood Service (NZBS) workers, who are represented by the Public Service Association or PSA (Māori: Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi), collect and process blood and tissue samples from donors to ensure they are safe for transfer.
“Our colleagues at Te Whatu Ora [Health New Zealand] are being paid up to 35% more than us and we want to be paid too. We want fair pay,” Esperanza Stuart, a New Zealand Blood Service scientist, told Star News.
“The stall in negotiations is largely attributed to a lack of movement from NZBS on the principal issue of parity with Te Whatu Ora laboratory workers rates of pay. There is currently a 21-28% pay differential between NZBS and Te Whatu Ora laboratory workers, despite both groups of workers performing essentially the same work,” NZ Doctor noted.
Health New Zealand is the country’s government-run healthcare system.
The first strike took place on May 31 from 1-5 pm. A second 24-hour strike is planned for June 4. The strikers outlined the rest of their strike schedule as follows:
The PSA union claims that the pay disparity workers are experiencing is pushing veteran workers out and complicating recruitment of new workers.
New Zealand Blood Service workers and junior doctors are once again back on the picket line to protest wage cuts and pay disparities. “I think it should be a signal that things are not right in our health system when there are multiple groups of workers going on strike simultaneously,” said PSA union organizer Alexandra Ward. Clinical laboratory workers in the US are closely monitoring the goings on in New Zealand as pressure over staff shortages and working conditions continue to mount in this country as well. (Photo copyright: RNZ.)
Clinical Laboratory Worker Strikes Ongoing in New Zealand
This is far from the first time New Zealand lab workers have hit the picket line.
In “Medical Laboratory Workers Again on Strike at Large Clinical Laboratory Company Locations around New Zealand,” Dark Daily reported on a medical laboratory workers strike that took place in 2023 in New Zealand’s South Island and Wellington regions. The workers walked off the job after a negotiated agreement was not reached between APEX, a “specialist union representing over 4,000 allied, scientific, and technical health professionals,” according to the union’s website, and Awanui Labs, one of the country’s largest hospital and clinical laboratory services providers.
This latest strike is likely to cause delays in vital surgeries and risk the nation’s critical blood supply. All of these strikes were spurred on by low pay, negative working conditions and worker burnout. Similar issues have caused labor actions in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service in recent years.
Junior Doctors Join Blood Service Workers on Picket Line
Blood service workers aren’t the only healthcare employees in New Zealand’s medical community taking action. In May about half of the nation’s junior doctors walked off the job for 25 hours to protest proposed pay cuts, NZ Herald reported.
In a letter to the nation’s public hospitals, Sarah Morley, PhD, NZBS’s Chief Medical Officer, “warned [that] even high priority planned surgeries should be deferred because they did not meet the definition of a ‘life-preserving service,’” and that “only surgeries where there is less than a 5% risk that patients may need a transfusion should be carried out,” RNZ reported.
According to an internal memo at Mercy Ascot, NZBS “did not consider cancers and cardiac operations in private hospitals to be a life-preserving service,” RNZ noted.
The situation may be more dangerous than officials are letting on, NZ Herald noted. A senior doctor at Waikato Hospital told reporters, “There are plenty of elective services cancelled today—clinics, surgery, day stay procedures etc. … And although I can only speak for my department, we are really tight for cover from SMO [senior medical officers] staff for acute services and pretty much all elective work has been cancelled. So, it’s actually pretty dire, and if next week’s planned strike goes ahead it’s going to be worse. I’d go as far as to say that it’s bordering on unsafe.”
The strike did take place, and the junior doctors went back on strike at the end of May as well, according to RNZ.
Support from Patients
Eden Hawkins, a junior doctor on strike at Wellington Hospital told RNZ that patient wellbeing is a top concern of striking workers and that patients have shown support for the doctors.
“When patients have brought it up with me on the wards or in other contexts there seems to be a bolstering sense of support around us, which is really reassuring and heartening because there’s obviously a conflict within ourselves when we strike, we don’t want to be doing that,” she said. Hawkins also makes the argument that striking workers can improve patient wellbeing in the long run. Improvement of pay and conditions could lessen staff turnover and overall improve the standard of care.
New Zealand healthcare workers haven’t been shy when it comes to fighting for the improved working conditions and fair pay. And their problems are far from unique. American healthcare workers have been struggling with worker burnout, pay disparities, high turnover as well. Clinical laboratory and other healthcare professionals in the US would be wise to keep an eye on their Kiwi counterparts.
It’s not only medical laboratory technicians, healthcare workers across the board continue to deal with extreme pressures that preceded the pandemic
Burnout in healthcare is a constant problem, especially in overstressed clinical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups. To raise awareness about the plight of medical laboratory technicians (MLTs) and other frontline workers in the healthcare industry, a former lab tech recounted her experience during the COVID-19 pandemic that led to burnout and her departure from the lab profession during 2020-2021.
Suzanna Bator was formerly a laboratory technician with the Cleveland Clinic and with MetroHealth System in Cleveland, Ohio. Her essay in Daily Nurse, titled, “The Hidden Healthcare Heroes: A Lab Techs Journey Through the Pandemic,” is a personalized, human look at the strain clinical laboratory technicians were put under during the pandemic. Her story presents the quandary of how to keep these critical frontline healthcare workers from experiencing burnout and leaving the field.
“We techs were left unsupported and unmentored throughout the pandemic. No one cared if we were learning or growing in our job, and there was little encouragement for us to enter training or residency programs. We were just expendable foot soldiers: this is not a policy that leads to long-term job retention,” she wrote.
Clinical laboratory leaders and pathology group managers may find valuable insights in Bator’s essay that they can use when developing worker support programs for their own clinical laboratories and practices.
“The pressure never let up. No matter how mind-numbing and repetitive the work could get, we had to work with constant vigilance, as there was absolutely no room for error,” Suzanna Bator wrote in Daily Nurse. Burnout in clinical laboratories is an ongoing problem that increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo copyright: Daily Nurse.)
Hopeful Beginnings and Eager to Help
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, folks in every industry stepped up. Fashion designers tasked their haute couture seamstresses with making personal protective equipment (PPE), neighbors brought food and supplies to their immunosuppressed or elderly neighbors, and healthcare workers took on enormous workloads outside of their own departments and traditional responsibilities, The New York Times reported.
When Bator joined the Cleveland Clinic’s COVID-19 team she had no clinical lab tech accreditations. Nevertheless, she and 12 other non-accredited hires were quickly put onto the second and third shifts to keep up with SARS-CoV-2 test demands.
“In the beginning, I was so happy to be helping and working during the pandemic. I felt proud to be on the front lines, honing my skills and discovering what it was like to work under intense pressure. My work was good even when the work was hard. There was no room for error and no time to waste.”
At the Cleveland Clinic, Bator and her colleagues did not experience the equipment and supply shortages other clinics faced, at least not in the beginning of the pandemic. That began to change in late 2020.
Unrelenting Pace and Supply Shortages as Pandemic Grew
Despite their state-of-the-art equipment at the Cleveland Clinic, problems began to arise as the pandemic wore on.
“The machines we worked on were never meant to be run at this intensity and would frequently break down during the second shift. Those of us on the third shift were then left to deal with these problems despite our lack of technical training. Even worse, there were no supervisors on staff to help us problem-solve or troubleshoot, which only added to the pressure,” Bator noted.
And the high demand for testing left little room for new lab techs to hone any other skills.
“The pressure never let up. No matter how mind-numbing and repetitive the work could get, we had to work with constant vigilance, as there was absolutely no room for error,” she added.
Eventually, Bator left the Cleveland Clinic for a county hospital to “get off the graveyard shift and begin working on more than just COVID testing,” she wrote. However, soon after her move the Omicron variant hit, and she was once again running COVID tests.
Six months later she had had enough. She burned out and “dropped out of the industry after only a few years,” she wrote. And she was not the only one.
“The [Cleveland] Clinic began to hemorrhage techs who left for better opportunities at different hospitals or in different fields. Of my original 15-or-so-member team two years ago, only four remain in the same department, and only about half remain in the clinical lab field at all,” Bator wrote.
Burnout in Clinical Laboratories
Worker burnout is a state of mental and/or physical exhaustion caused by a heavy workload. Those experiencing burnout may feel emotionally overwhelmed, anxious, and depressed. Burnout can manifest in physical, mental, and emotional symptoms.
Burnout in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is an issue affecting all facets of healthcare. According to Forbes, a 2022 report by Elsevier Health found that 47% of US healthcare workers plan to leave their current role in the next two to three years, in some measure due to the enormous pressures healthcare workers face.
And workers are not the only ones paying attention to burnout. On May 23, 2022, the United States Surgeon General, Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy, MD, issued a Surgeon General’s Advisory highlighting the need to address worker burnout.
“COVID-19 has been a uniquely traumatic experience for the health workforce and for their families, pushing them past their breaking point,” Murthy noted. “Now, we owe them a debt of gratitude and action. And if we fail to act, we will place our nation’s health at risk. This Surgeon General’s Advisory outlines how we can all help heal those who have sacrificed so much to help us heal.”
Healthcare workers were facing high levels of burnout before 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic only made the issue worse. The National Academies of Medicine (NAM) reported in 2019 that worker burnout had reached a “crisis level,” and that during the pandemic, half of all healthcare workers reported symptoms of at least one mental health condition.
Training Programs Needed to Offset Worker Shortages and Retain Staff
As Bator reported in Daily Nurse, “The American Society of Clinical Pathology (ASCP)—the largest association for [medical] laboratory professionals—has stressed the importance of promoting MLS/MLT programs to produce certified, well-trained lab professionals, to fill major staffing shortages. However, filling the positions is only one piece of the puzzle.”
Bator points out that there wasn’t space nor time for guidance or advancement with the sheer volume of SARS-CoV-2 testing they had to complete.
“Late last year, during the worst of the Omicron variant surge, the only people I could commiserate with were the nurses who thanked us for running their pediatric ICU tests first,” she said. “They understood what we meant when we said we were drowning and stopped calling the lab to pester us for results because they knew that the positivity rate in Cuyahoga County was the third highest in the country and that the entire system was overwhelmed.”
Suzanna Bator is just one early-career worker among many healthcare professionals who have experienced this type of burnout due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As made evident by her piece, the pathology and clinical laboratory professions are losing workers who otherwise might have entered training programs to further their careers in those fields.
The issue of worker burnout is not just a temporary stressor on the clinical laboratory industry. Both worker burnout and staffing shortages in labs preceded the pandemic and will have continuing long-term effects unless steps are taken to reverse it.
