Shortages in national telehealth services arise from low pay

It was a bit disheartening to read this article in the New Zealand Herald this morning:

The national telehealth service is struggling to recruit enough qualified clinical staff to operate 24/7 phone lines for triaging people with mental health problems, according to employees and union representatives.

They say the understaffing at Whakarongorau Aotearoa’s specialist mental health team, which provides triage lines for many of Health NZ’s public mental health services, as well as supporting police and ambulance services by handling some 111 calls, is causing distressed callers to wait longer and putting enormous strain on its workforce...

According to an internal document, Whakarongorau’s EMHR unit has a budget for 29 full-time clinicians but has “significant gaps” in its rosters because of staff turnover, sick leave, and recruitment challenges. In a recent four-week period, more than half the shifts were understaffed.

“We are expecting it to become even more difficult in the coming weeks and months until we can recruit more clinicians,” the document said. Hiring more qualified staff was challenging because of national workforce shortages and because Whakarongorau pays less than Health NZ.

That last sentence is really the driver of this situation. There is a shortage of workers for the mental health triage lines because they simply don't pay enough. Consider the market for mental health clinicians working in call centres (or similar), as shown in the diagram below. The market wage for these workers is W0, which is below the equilibrium wage of W1. At the market wage, the quantity of clinician hours demanded is QD, but the quantity of clinician hours supplies is only QS. The difference between QS and QD is the shortage of clinician hours.

If wages were more competitive with those offered by Health NZ, then more clinicians would agree to work in these services. In other words, if the wage were allowed to rise, that would increase the number of clinician hours supplied. The market would move up the supply curve. If wages increased to the equilibrium wage W1, then the quantity of clinician hours supplied would increase to Q1, which would then match the quantity of clinician hours demanded (which would decrease to Q1, moving up along the demand curve [*]). Since the quantity of clinician hours demanded would be equal to the quantity of clinician hours supplied, there would no longer be a shortage.

So, in order to resolve the shortage of clinicians here, the workers need to be paid more.

*****

[*] I've opted to show a downward-sloping demand curve here, which suggests that, as clinician wages increase, the quantity of hours demanded would decrease. Arguably, the number of clinician hours demanded doesn't depend on wages, in which case the demand curve should be vertical (perfectly inelastic). That wouldn't materially change any of the remaining points though, so I've gone with a conventional downward-sloping demand curve.