Workforce shortage New Zealand
Sonographers are highly skilled health professionals that perform the majority of comprehensive medical diagnostic ultrasound services for many medical conditions, including pregnancy, cancer and a wide range of other diseases.
Despite increasing demand for sonographer services, there is a significant, ongoing shortage of sonographers across both Australia and New Zealand. This shortage is exacerbated given that the majority of roles are part time or casual.
Several risks arise from the critical shortage of sonographers, include:
- direct impacts on patients’ access to timely, quality diagnostic ultrasound services. There can be long waiting periods, especially for non-acute and specialist services and in rural and remote areas.
- delays in accessing these services can result in increased costs to the patient and the health system due to having to treat a more advanced health condition and is associated with avoidable poor (sometimes catastrophic) health outcomes for the patient.
- if patients are unable to access ultrasound services, they will likely be referred to other more costly diagnostic imaging such as CT or MRI. This also significantly increases the likelihood the patient does not receive the diagnostic exam quickly or at all.
- detrimental impacts on sonographers, including staff burnout and workplace injury.
The most significant barrier to addressing the sonographer workforce shortage is the poor availability of sonographer clinical training placements.
With most diagnostic imaging (70%) provided in private practice, private businesses can no longer afford to provide an adequate supply of sonographer training placements due to the significant resource and financial cost associated with the provision of clinical training placements.
We need all Australian and New Zealand governments to support initiatives to assist both private and public health services across the country to increase the number of clinical training placements, for both postgraduate and undergraduate sonographer students.
To support discussion around the critical sonographer workforce shortage facing our health services, the ASA has prepared the following Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
Read more about the background to the sonographer workforce shortage in New Zealand HERE
If you have a question or for more information, please email policy@sonographers.org
