Underfunding of clinical laboratories has led to similar worker walkouts in multiple Australasian nations
Once again, cuts in government spending on pathology services has forced healthcare workers to walk off the job in Australia. This is in line with other pathology doctor and clinical laboratory workers strikes in New Zealand and other Australasian nations over the past few years.
Announcement of a planned closure of the pathology laboratory at 30-bed Cootamundra Hospital in Australia to make room for expanding the emergency department spurred the health worker walkouts.
“Health staff from Cootamundra Hospital, alongside pathology workers from Deniliquin, Tumut, Griffith, Wagga Wagga, and Young will rally in front of their respective facilities” to draw attention to the effect closing the lab would have on critical healthcare services across those areas, Region Riverina reported.
The strikes are drawing attention to unfair pay and poor working conditions that underfunding has brought to the state-run healthcare systems in those nations. They also highlight how clinical laboratories worldwide are similarly struggling with facility closings, unfair pay, and unachievable workloads.
“The proposed closure of Cootamundra’s pathology lab is a short-sighted decision that will have far-reaching consequences for patient care in the region,” NSW Health Services Union (HSU) Secretary Gerard Hayes (above) told Region Riverina. Similar arguments have been made for years concerning the underfunding, pay disparities, and poor working conditions in New Zealand’s government-run clinical laboratories and pathology practices that has led to worker strikes there as well. (Photo copyright: HSU.)
Australia Pathology Lab Closure Stokes Fears
Cootamundra Hospital’s strike was spurred by a planned closure of its pathology laboratory. In May, employees learned of the plans to close the lab as well as surgery and birthing centers to accommodate expansion of the emergency department, Region Riverina reported.
“Pathology workers are already in short supply and this move could see us lose highly skilled professionals from the NSW Health system altogether,” New South Wales (NSW) Health Services Union (HSU) Secretary Gerard Hayes told Region Riverina.
The cuts would not only be detrimental to the area, it would significantly affect patient care, he added.
“This lab is not just profitable; it’s a vital lifeline for Cootamundra Hospital’s [surgical] theater lists and maternity unit,” he said. “Without this lab, patients will face significantly longer wait times for life-saving diagnostic information. This delay could severely impact our ability to provide timely care, especially in emergencies.”
Echoing those sentiments, HSU Union Official Sam Oram told Region Riverina that closing the Cootamundra Hospital lab would put pressure on labs in Wagga and Young and would continue a trend of closing smaller pathology labs. Oram, who organizes for members in Canberra and Murrumbidgee Local Health District, noted that smaller labs in Tumut and Deniliquin could be in danger as well.
“Why should people living in rural and regional areas have fewer and inferior services to Australians living in metropolitan areas?” Michael McCormack, MP, Federal Member for Riverina and former deputy prime minister of Australia, asked Parliament in June, Region Riverinareported. “There’s no right or proper answer to that question. They simply should not,” he added.
Tasmania’s Troubles
Medical scientists recently walked off the job at Launceston General Hospital in Tasmania, Australia, to protest “the government’s ‘inaction’ on recruiting more staff,” according to Pulse Tasmania. The hospital’s lab has a staff shortage of 17 employees, requiring the remaining staff members to handle a much increased workload, Ryan Taylor, a medical laboratory scientist with the Tasmanian Department of Health, told Pulse Tasmania.
“This shortfall is leading to significant and unacceptable challenges … which are causing the Tasmanian community from receiving vital test results that are essential for their health,” Lucas Digney, Industrial Champion, Health and Community Services Union (HACSU) leader, told Pulse Tasmania.
New Zealand Struggles with Its Healthcare Workers
Aotearoa, as New Zealand is known by its indigenous Polynesian population, also struggles with health worker walkouts.
“Medical labs are an essential organ of the health system. Many were stupidly privatized years ago, others still operate within Te Whatu Ora [aka Health New Zealand, the publicly funded healthcare system] with all the resource shortages and stress that go with that,” Newsroom said of the country’s plight in 2023. “There was a view that competition in medical labs would produce greater efficiency, but it has actually produced a mess.”
Dark Daily has covered the ongoing strife in New Zealand’s clinical laboratories over many years. Previous ebriefs highlighted how the strikes were causing delays in critical clinical laboratory blood testing and surgical procedures.
Underfunding in clinical laboratories continues to cause work stoppages in the Australasian countries. But as Dark Daily readers know, it is a growing problem among European nations and in the United States as well.
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.
Following the loss of its histology accreditation, pressure on APS laboratory continues to mount
Government-run healthcare systems around the world often under-invest as demand grows and new healthcare technologies enter clinical practice. One such example is taking place in New Zealand, where public pathology and medical laboratory services are under extreme stress as physician test orders exceed the ability of the island nation’s clinical laboratories to keep up.
“The escalating pressure is complicating what was already a very difficult rescue job at one of the country’s busiest labs—Community Anatomic Pathology Services (APS),” RNZ reported. In 2023, APS lost its histology accreditation after it came to light that lab workers were not only exposed to toxic chemical levels at the facility, but that patients were waiting weeks for test results to return from the lab.
“The service is in crisis mode and, without urgent investment … there is a real risk that it will fail. The changes required are of such urgency that it is recommended that they be placed at the top of the agenda,” the report reads, RNZ reported.
“The size of New Zealand’s economy is restricting what our country spends on health. Health is already the second highest demand on the New Zealand tax dollar,” wrote Andrew Blair, CMInstD (above), then General Manager of Royston Hospital, Hastings, New Zealand, in an article he penned for Jpn Hosp, the journal of the Japan Hospital Association. “The tolerance of New Zealanders would be challenged if a government attempted to increase taxes further to meet the growing demands for expenditure on health, but at the same time the population’s expectations are increasing. This is the challenging situation we face today.” For New Zealand’s clinical laboratories, the demand for testing is increasing annually as the country’s population grows. (Photo copyright: Blair Consulting.)
Increased Demand on APS Leads to Problems
Established in 2015, APS tests thousands of anatomic and tissue samples yearly and is utilized by approximately a third of NZ’s population, according to RNZ.
The big story, however, is that from 2022 to 2023 utilization increased by a third. “The overall increasing demand is greater than the capacity of the service,” Te Whatu Ora (Health New Zealand), the country’s publicly-funded healthcare system, told RNZ.
As planned care increased, public hospitals started outsourcing operations to private surgical centers. A domino effect ensued when all of those samples then made their way to APS. There was an “increased volume of private surgery being carried out by 600 specialists in the region and 2,000 general practitioners, with up to 450 histology cases a day,” RNZ noted, adding, “The backlog has hit turnaround times for processing samples, which had been deteriorating.”
To make matters even more dire, working conditions at the country’s clinical labs is unfavorable and deteriorating, with short staffing, outdated workspaces and equipment, and exposure to dangerous chemicals.
“Conditions got so bad from 2019-2021 that workers were exposed to cancer-causing formaldehyde in cramped workspaces, and flammable chemicals were stored unsafely,” RNZ reported.
While pay increases and safety improvements have provided some relief, the memory of past incidences coupled with increasing delays continue to undermine confidence in New Zealand’s laboratory industry.
Patients Also at Risk Due to Long Delays in Test Results
“We recognize the concern and impact any delayed results can cause referrers and their patients,” Health New Zealand said in a statement, RNZ reported.
Nevertheless, a 2023 article in The Conversation noted that, “38,000 New Zealanders had been waiting longer than the four-month target for being seen by a specialist for an initial assessment.”
However, according to plastic surgeon and Melanoma Network of New Zealand (MelNet) Chair Gary Duncan, MBChB, FRACS, when patients return to their doctors for test results, those results often have not come back from the medical laboratory. Therefore, the physician cannot discuss any issues, which causes the patient to have to make another appointment or receive a melanoma diagnosis over the telephone, RNZ reported.
“Slow pathology services are unfair to patients. Such delays could result in the spreading of the melanoma to other parts of the body and require major surgery under anesthetic,” dermatologist Louise Reiche, MBChB, FRACS, told RNZ. “Not only will they suffer an extensive surgical procedure, but it could also shorten their life.”
Improvements at APS Underway
Changes are currently underway that may decrease the long delays in test results at New Zealand’s labs. “A business case was being done to set up an electronic ordering system to cut down on manual processing errors,” RNZ reported.
Additionally, “the situation is much improved due to dispersal of work around [the] city and country for now. The teamwork around the region has been a veritable lifesaver,” a source familiar with the work told RNZ.
Construction of a new lab for APS is also allegedly in the works. However, to date no announcement has been made, according to RNZ.
Time will tell if New Zealand’s government can repair its pathology system. News stories showcasing damage caused by lengthy delays in clinical laboratory test results—and the ensuing patient harm due to rationed care in general—continue to reveal the weakness in government-run healthcare systems.
This comes on top of months of strikes by NZ medical laboratory workers seeking fair pay and safe working conditions
Te Whatu Ora (aka, Health New Zealand, the country’s publicly funded healthcare system) recently ordered health and safety checks at multiple clinical laboratories in 18 districts across the country. This action is the result of safety issues detected after procedural discrepancies were discovered in separate labs.
According to Radio New Zealand(RNZ), Health New Zealand found “significant risks” at some medical laboratories and that “staff at one in Auckland were exposed to toxic fumes, at others two [people] caught typhoid, and delays jeopardized patients’ care.”
“Two lab workers were hospitalized this year after having caught typhoid from samples, one at a private lab in Auckland, and a second at Canterbury Health Laboratories, CHL,” RNZ reported.
A Health New Zealand internal document states there will need to be a “comprehensive” fix to deal with risks present in the island nation’s medical laboratory industry. The assessment states that the organization needs “a more detailed picture of the occupational health and health and safety risks present in our laboratories,” RNZ reported.
“The overall state of the laboratories and the practices they have in place pose an inherited risk from the former DHBs [district health boards] and will likely need a comprehensive approach to addressing significant and/or ongoing risks,” Health New Zealand said in the internal document. “There is growing demand on our laboratories in terms of the volume of the work, which can put pressure on processes, and work is often undertaken in facilities that, over time, may have become not fit for purpose.”
This story as an example of how clinical laboratory staff can be exposed to disease and toxic chemicals when procedures are not diligently followed. It is a reminder to all lab managers that diligence in following protective protocols is imperative.
“Te Whatu Ora is committed to identifying, tracking and mitigating all potential risks and issues within our service until they are fully resolved and no longer identifiable as an issue/risk,” Rachel Haggerty (above), Director, Strategy, Planning and Purchasing, Hospital and Specialist Services, for Health New Zealand told NZ Doctor. Clinical laboratory workers in New Zealand have been striking for fair pay and safe working environments for months. Now, they risk becoming infected by deadly pathogens and chemicals as well. (Photo copyright: NZ Doctor.)
Lab Worker Strikes and Staff Shortages
Community Anatomic Pathology Services in Auckland lost its histology accreditation last year because it was discovered that lab workers were exposed to toxic chemical levels at the facility. In addition, patients were forced to wait weeks for test results from that lab.
The laboratory was also penalized back in 2017 for how substances were handled when formaldehyde levels in excess of the recommended limits were detected.
Bryan Raill, a medical scientist at the Counties Manukau District Health Board, said the laboratory workers union in New Zealand believes staff shortages and lab conditions are contributing to the lab woes. Raill is also president of the medical laboratory workers division of APEX, a specialist union representing more than 4,000 allied, scientific, and technical health professionals throughout New Zealand.
“It’s not only your physical environment, being safe there, but you have to be safe in terms of what you do,” Raill told RNZ.
Raill said the two typhoid infections were a red flag and that Te Whatu Ora needs to do more.
“They’re stepping out of the inertia they’ve been bound, so this is a good thing, but it needs to be a wider thing,” he said.
“They should look at the other health and safety aspect of the workload and the work environment that staff are working under,” Raill explained in an iHeart podcast. “The person who caught typhoid in Christchurch spent four days in ICU, and there had been a workplace exposure to another pathogen two years earlier and the recommendations that came out of that hadn’t been followed. For example, [the lab workers] were not vaccinated against typhoid.”
IT Implementation Delays also to Blame
Along with strikes and staff shortages, clinical laboratories in New Zealand are also dealing with information technology (IT) issues. Technical problems have delayed some needed lab upgrades by more than a year.
In addition, “The impacts of new test, surgeries, and medicines/treatments on pathology services have also historically not been understood well nor accounted for and we are considering a number of options, as outlined in the risk register, to manage this,” said Rachel Haggerty, Director, Strategy, Planning and Purchasing, Hospital and Specialist Services, for Te Whatu Ora.
Future efforts will deal with training of lab personnel and focus on ventilation and hazardous substance management.
Dark Daily has reported extensively on the ongoing problems within New Zealand clinical laboratory industry.
Clinical laboratory personnel can be exposed to dangerous diseases and toxic chemicals when procedures are not diligently followed. This latest situation in New Zealand serves as a reminder that following protective protocols is imperative in labs worldwide to protect workers and patients.
