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Frank'smemoirs

Health Service

At the beginning of 1988 I moved from the Department of Social Welfare to the Taranaki Hospital Boiard's staff development role as part of the Human Resource Department.

Our offices were in the old nurses home in Barrett Street; in fact my office was close to the room Margaret's sister, Denise, had lived in while doing her nursing training twenty years before. Nearby in the old hospital were geriatric wards, TB ward, psychiatric ward and departments like dirstrict nursing and transport. All the other Board services were on the "new" site in David Street, Westown, where the hospital still operates.

The Board was in the process of morphing itself into an Area Health Board, absorbing the local office of the old Health Department, covering Public Health, Environmental Health and Health Promotion. The new set-up was planned to shift emphasis in health services away from operations, hospitals and drugs, and towards green prescription type treatment and even more towards preventions rather than cures. (Ruth Richardson's "Mother of all budgets" threatened to halt this process, but the world had moved on.)

Before I had got my head around the new job we were hit by Cyclone Bola, which removed tiles from the roof of our building, and gave the emergency services a workout.

Before long more departments were moved to the new site, and as the number of patients and staff at Barrett Street dropped eventually the kitchen and cafeteria were closed down. Now one of the perks of working at Barrett Street was that the caf served delicious salads very cheaply at lunchtimes, which I very much enjoyed. When the kitchen closed I asked the staff for some of their salad recipes; in particular their bean salad was wonderful and I still make it from time to time. By 1990 we had all moved up to David Street.

My job included teaching some special courses, in particular the induction programme for all staff, and developing a junior management training programme. I was soon struck by the anxiety among a large proportion of the front-line staff, especially nurses, about the impending introduction of computers and computer systems to the health service. So we set about putting their minds at rest.

Those who remember the eighties will know there were a variety of brands of PC, and a variety of software systems available. As teachers we had to master each system very rapidly in order to be able to teach it to our colleagues: Wordperfect, WordStar, and eventually Word on the old Apple IIe computers.

We arranged for two local High Schools to let us use their computer suites for the late afternoons for a few weeks. Staff were offered computer-familiarisation sessions on the basis that they could leave their shift at 4 pm and attend the sessions which lasted till 6. Each course ran Monday to Friday of one week, so they had ten hours of familiarisation. The PCs were 64kb Amstrads, with no hard drive, or similar models. We simply aimed to reassure the trainees that they could safely learn to use a computer without major accidents, and become confident in a relatively short time. Overall a couple of hundred people took advantage of the opportunity.

 

The Junior Management Training programme selected high-flying junior frontline staff members and put them through a course of preparation for applying for promotion.

 

Later we looked at the insurance records for Board cars and found that much of the accident cost was caused by relatively minor prangs: district nurses and others reversing into low walls, especially at night. So two of us qualified as Defensive Driving Instructors and ran a series of Defensive Driving courses for staff who drove Board cars.

 

A year or two into my stint with the Board, I was asked to take responsibility for the Equal Employment Opportunities programme, which eventually took up up to half my time. I also edited a staff newsletter.

 

The EEO programme consciously encouraged managers to consider appointing more disabled people, more women, more Maori, to jobs in the Board's staff. In particular we organised a series of Treaty Workshops to enable staff to take on board the attitude shifts needed to encourage Maori to feel more at home with the health services we provided.

 

In 1990 Margaret was appointed to a full-time job and I asked to be able to work half-time only. So I relinquished my responsibility for EEO and worked 20 hours a week on Staff Development. From the beginning of 1993, the department was restructured and I was offered a redundancy deal in the form of 8 hours a week at Ward 23, the specialist dementia ward in a newly built ward at David Street, and I eagerly agreed, and set about learning about Dementia. I was to be the activities officer.