Our new Health Minister, Guy Barnett, was sworn in on Tuesday and we’ve asked him to sit down with us to talk about the challenges you face every day working in health. We’re hopeful that together we can come up with some real solutions to the problems you’ve been experiencing for a long time.

The short of it is that our new Minister is inheriting a broken system – and the only reason patients and the community are still able to use our services now is because of your dedication and hard work, day-in and day-out.

When we meet, we’re going to make it clear to the new Health Minister that it’s time we see action to fix issues like ambulance ramping, our overburdened emergency department, bed block on wards and recruitment and retention issues that are making the situation so much worse.

We already made the call that the Minister should meet with workers directly (including your delegates and other representatives) because you know better than anyone what needs to change.

HACSU have local delegate committees at each hospital as well as dedicated Allied Health, Ambulance and Nurses Sub-Branches that are all working on how we can fix health together.

Every one of your representatives, and anyone who’s worked in the health system, knows that we urgently need more staff and more resources.

For years successive governments have neglected our health system – and they’ve failed to deal with the challenges you face. Now is the time for real change, and we need to keep working together to make sure the new Health Minister is accountable for this.

We’ll update you as soon as the Minister gets back to us, and make sure we let you know more information about how you can get involved.

In the meantime, if you’ve got any questions or want to know more, please make sure you get in touch with us via HACSUassist.