Reducing pay disparity for nurses and kaiāwhina in General Practice and Urgent Care: Required reporting information
This document has been prepared to support general practices in completing the Pay Disparities reporting form circulated by their Primary Health Organisations (PHOs)
For more information about the pay disparities initiative, including FAQs in relation to pay disparities funding for the general practice sector, please see: https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/whats-happening/what-toexpect/for-sector-and-service-providers/pay-disparities/
Required reporting
You are completing this reporting form as you accepted a formal offer for additional funding (Pay Disparity funding) to reduce the pay gap between your Eligible Workers, and comparable Te Whatu Ora employed workers covered by the collective agreement between Te Whatu Ora and the New Zealand Nurses Organisation.
The offer conditions included a requirement to report on your use of the funding. This needs to be completed by a person authorised to submit this information on behalf of your organisation
As your organisation has accepted Te Whatu Ora’s offer for funding, completion of this reporting form is mandatory. This was set out in the terms and conditions of the offer for funding.
Privacy Statement
This privacy statement outlines how Te Whatu Ora intends to collect, use, store and share the information collected in accordance with the Privacy Act 2020.
Individual practice information will be collected by your PHO. PHOs will collate information for all practices within their network and provide aggregated data to Te Whatu Ora in relation to the practices’ use of the funding.
PHOs may also provide Te Whatu Ora with information in relation to individual practices that do not appear to have used the funding in accordance with the conditions of the funding.
Te Whatu Ora will use the information collected for the purpose of confirming that Pay Disparity funding has been used in a manner that complies with the terms of the offer. These terms require that the funding is to be used to increase pay rates for eligible staff, and discretion to use a portion of the funding to close the gap with other Te Whatu Ora terms and conditions including penal rates.
Identifiable information about employees (names, contact details, addresses etc.) are not collected, and Te Whatu Ora does not make any effort to identify individual employees from information collected.
How we use this information
Te Whatu Ora will use this information, but is not limited to, confirming your organisation has complied with the contractual terms of the Pay Disparity offer. The information may also be used at an aggregated level to report back to the Ministry of Health, other agencies, and relevant Ministers regarding the use of the Pay Disparity funding. Te Whatu Ora may also publish aggregated information in line with the principles of open and transparent government, or if requested under the Official Information Act 1982.
Access to information
Individual responses passed on to Te Whatu Ora by PHOs will only be available to a limited number of Te Whatu Ora staff for the purposes outlined above and will be considered as Commercial in Confidence. Communications regarding the information you have provided and verification of use of the funding in line with the contracted terms will be initially made with the authorised person noted in your response, and/or the contract holder as applicable.
How long we keep the information for
Reporting responses and any follow-on reports based on the information provided will be kept in accordance with any requirements of the Public Records Act 2005, Privacy Act 2020, and Te Whatu Ora privacy and data security guidelines.
Queries or concerns
If you have any queries or concerns about how your information is managed by Te Whatu Ora, please email HNZPrivacy@health.govt.nz , or contact your PHO.
General information
You are being asked to provide information for each of the following roles at your practice:
• Enrolled Nurses
• Registered/Community Nurses
• Designated Senior Nurses
• Nurse Practitioners
• Eligible Kaiāwhina
For the purposes of pay disparity funding:
Nurse means an employee working in a nursing role and whose position description or employment agreement or letter of offer requires them to be registered by the Nursing Council of New Zealand, which, to avoid doubt, includes an enrolled nurse.
For clarity, funding has not been provided to increase the pay of self-employed, contractor or bureau nurses.
Eligible Kaiāwhina - a person who you determine has a position description that has 50% or more in common with the Te Whatu Ora-employed Health Care Assistant position description. This position description was included as Appendix 1 of the funding offer you received, available here:
https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/assets/Whats-happening/What-to-expect/For-sector-and-serviceproviders/Pay-disparities/General-practice-pay-disparity-funding-offer-example.pdf
Designated senior nurses – Nurses you employ in roles that specifically require a registered nurse in a dedicated senior role (this could include Nurse Specialist, Nurse Prescriber, Clinical Nursing Manager or a similar senior nursing role).
Please note: we have split out the Nurse Practitioner reporting from Designated Senior Nurses to align with pay disparity reporting requirements for other sectors.
You are being asked to provide information for two pay periods:
• The payday immediately preceding 14 December 2022
• The payday immediately preceding 31 August 2023
This is a change to the indicative reporting information that was included in the Appendix to your Agreements, where it was indicated that practices would likely be asked to provide aggregated wage information at 30 June 2023 and 31 August 2023.
Te Whatu Ora received feedback from the sector that practices should be allowed to use the pay disparity funding to cover costs of wage increases that had been made before the pay disparities funding came into effect. Based on this feedback, Te Whatu Ora has enabled funding to be used to cover the costs associated to wage increases that had been implemented after the Te Whatu Ora Agreement In Principle rates were announced on 14 December 2022.
Consequently, we will be asking practices to report wage information at 14 December 2022 and 31 August 2023. This will enable those practices that have used pay disparity funding to cover the costs of wage increases made after 14 December 2022 to report on the wage increases funded through the pay disparity funding. It will also enable Te Whatu Ora to demonstrate, on behalf of the sector, the full impact achieved through this initiative.
Question specific information
Has the Pay Disparity funding you received been used to increase the gross (before tax) base pay rates of your Eligible Workers to at least 95% of the relevant Te Whatu Ora Rates?
For the purpose of the pay disparity funding, the relevant Te Whatu Ora rates are the rates included in Appendix 2 of the funding offer you received, available here:
https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/assets/Whats-happening/What-to-expect/For-sector-and-serviceproviders/Pay-disparities/General-practice-pay-disparity-funding-offer-example.pdf
With the introduction or increase in penal rates, did you reach alignment with Te Whatu Ora rates?
The relevant Te Whatu Ora penal rates are included in brackets after each option as a reference. These are noted as a multiplier of the base rate (T1). For example, Overtime as T2 would be double time, while weekend penal of +T0.5 would be 50% of the base rate in addition to the base rate.
Enrolled nurse FTE for the pay period:
A full-time equivalent refers to an individual working a 40 hour week. For example, if you have two staff who work 20 hours per week, this would be 1 FTE. If you have a staff member who performs two different roles, and has a separate job description / employment agreement for each role then the information should be allocated against each role.
Please note: this same definition applies to FTE for all questions asked in this section of the form.
Total number of paid hours for enrolled nurses in the pay period:
The total hours would include any sick or leave hours, as this should align with the FTE figure provided, based on 40 hours per week. We have taken this approach to avoid any issues with some providers having differing definitions of the hours worked for a full-time equivalent role.
Please note: this same definition applies to total hours for all questions asked in this section of the form
Total base pay for enrolled nurses in the pay period
Please provide the total hourly base wage rate only. Do not include other remuneration elements such as overtime, penal payments or other allowances.
The total base pay and total hours worked should be equivalent - i.e. we should be able to divide the total pay by the hours to calculate the average hourly base wage for your nurses.
Please note: this same definition applies to base pay for all questions asked in this section of the form
If you have questions in relation to the Pay Disparity Reporting, please contact your PHO in the first instance. If your PHO is unable to respond to your enquiry, or you have an enquiry about pay disparity in general, please contact paydisparities@health.govt.nz