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Source: Thinkstock
Frontline jobs in the health sector are on the line as the Government's squeeze on the public sector continues.
Waikato District Health Board (DHB) has confirmed it is searching for savings of $20m for the year from July and a further $5m in each of the two following years.
Chief executive Craig Climo said the DHB would "almost certainly" have to look at job cuts.
"You start further back than the front line but I'm not going to rule out the front line," Climo told Radio New Zealand (RNZ).
"There's a lot of staff. If we were to say, for example, this has to come entirely out of administrative staff, that would be a totally unreasonable burden - the organisation couldn't function."
The Government has put the screws on spending across the state sector. Last year's budget included no new spending in any areas and departments were asked to draw up new four-year spending plans.
This year's budget is forecast to include a relatively meagre $800m in new spending - though that too could be slashed if economic conditions deteriorate. There is also no new capital spending forecast for the next five years, with any new projects to be funded out of the partial asset sales programme.
As a result of last year's tight budget, larger agencies had to make 6% spending cuts over four years and smaller departments, 3% cuts. The so-called "efficiency dividends" are being implemented from this year and have already been pointed to by Te Puni Kokiri as the driver for up to 50 staff being laid off.
In Wellington today, staff at the Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry will be briefed on plans that are believed to include cuts of up to 300 staff.
And Prime Minister John Key is expected to announce further major reforms in around a fortnight.
He last week suggested more savings could be found from consolidating IT services across departments.
The Public Service Association (PSA) last week sent Key a letter asking to urgently discuss any further reforms.
But PSA national secretary Brenda Pilott said the union had been told Key could not meet the union due to time pressures and referred their request to new State Services Minister Jonathan Coleman.
"We are disappointed he is not prepared to meet with us," Pilott said.
"This is a strategy the prime minister has fronted up on ... but he is not able to make the time to brief one of the key stakeholders about it."
Commenting on changes at the Waikato DHB, Labour's health spokeswoman Maryan Street said "doing away with frontline staff" was a "short-term solution" with "major ramifications".
"We need to be making better funding decisions when they matter. When costs start cutting into safety margins there is something really wrong with the system," Street said.
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director Ian Powell said the rate of increased health spending had been reducing while the demands on the health system kept increasing.
"So essentially, our funding is not keeping up with the level of service that the Government expects us to provide," Powell told RNZ.
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