Starship Children’s Hospital in Auckland has delayed 20 rounds of chemotherapy over the past four months because it does not have enough nurses to run its cancer ward safely, Health New Zealand has confirmed. Two bone marrow transplants were pushed back and two children from outside Auckland were sent to Christchurch for assessment. The agency says no delay lasted longer than a week and that the ward will be fully staffed within three months.
The disclosure came on Thursday after 1News reported that Starship had rescheduled some child cancer treatments. Dr Greg Williams, the hospital’s director of medical and community services, said the paediatric haematology and oncology service was managing nursing shortages at a time of high demand. “As a result of these shortages, we have had to reschedule some treatments, to ensure our services can still be delivered safely, within capacity, while remaining within reasonable timeframes,” he said.
Dr Williams told RNZ the choices were clinical ones. “These decisions are not made lightly and are based on clinical need. Starship is recruiting experienced and new graduate nurses as quickly as possible,” he said. Staff from other parts of Starship and Auckland City Hospital are being brought in to support the oncology team.
By Thursday evening Health New Zealand had put numbers on the problem. Dr Mike Shepherd, its director of operations for Auckland, told RNZ’s Checkpoint that 20 cycles of chemotherapy had been delayed over four months. “For context, we deliver over that period around 500 to 600 cycles of chemotherapy,” he said. On those figures roughly one cycle in every 25 to 30 was moved. Dr Shepherd said recruitment was now going well. “We have four new staff started and a further seven arriving over the next three months or so and I think that’ll get us up to full complement and that’ll be great for our team,” he said.
The scale of the shortage is set out in staffing data the New Zealand Nurses Organisation obtained from Health New Zealand under the Official Information Act and published on Thursday. The union says the haematology and oncology ward, known as 27B, was short of nurses on 85 per cent of all shifts in August. RNZ reported the August figure as 86 per cent and Dr Shepherd confirmed it, adding that it had fallen to 73 per cent in September and 33 per cent in the first two weeks of October. The union was only given data to the end of August.
The longer trend in the union’s figures is what worries nurses. In 2025 the ward recorded 342 shifts below target out of 1,095, or 31 per cent. In the first eight months of 2026 it recorded 310 below target out of 729, or 42 per cent. The shortfall in nursing hours grew from 466 hours across all of 2025 to 1,613 hours in 2026 to the end of August, and 1,125 of those missing hours fell in August alone. The union’s kaiwhakahaere, or MΔori leader, Kerri Nuku, said that was “equivalent to 6 full-time nurses short in the haematology and oncology inpatient ward for August”.
Nuku said the problem had been visible for a long time. “The haematology/oncology ward 27B at Starship has been under-staffed all year and Te Whatu Ora should have hired more nurses before they were forced to suspend vital cancer treatments for sick children,” she said in the union’s statement. She told Checkpoint there was “no excuse for this under-resourcing of a really vulnerable service”.
Health Minister Simeon Brown said he had asked Health New Zealand chief executive Dale Bramley for an explanation. In a statement to 1News he said, “I expect affected children to be seen as soon as possible while Health New Zealand recruits to fill the vacant positions.” His office later pushed back on the way the story was being described, saying no child had missed out on care. “A handful of chemotherapy sessions have been delayed by a few days, and never by more than seven,” the spokesperson said. “Two bone marrow transplants have been moved slightly from their original dates. This happens from time to time even when Starship is fully staffed, and both are still going ahead.”
The minister’s office said the vacancies were the result of natural attrition such as parental leave and retirement, and denied there was any hiring freeze at Health New Zealand. It also explained why the gaps could not simply be filled with new graduates. “Paediatric oncology is highly specialised work, so these roles need nurses with specific skills and experience. Graduate nurses are a valued part of the workforce, but they cannot always simply be placed into complex specialist roles,” the spokesperson said.
Nuku’s response, in the union’s release, was blunt. “Health Minister Simeon Brown can argue oncology services are being postponed and not suspended but such semantics are unlikely to be important to whΔnau with children with cancer,” she said.
For the families involved, the delays are measured in days spent waiting on a ward. Tanya Lapu’aho, whose two-and-a-half-year-old son was diagnosed with high-risk neuroblastoma in January, told RNZ’s Morning Report on Friday that his second bone marrow transplant had been delayed by at least a week because there were not enough specialist nurses to carry it out. She said her son had also waited for chemotherapy lines to be changed and for medication, and that the nurses on duty would apologise because they were not yet qualified for those tasks. She said a charge nurse had told her there was a hiring freeze, and that other parents were frightened to complain in case it affected their child’s care.
The Child Cancer Foundation, which supports families through treatment, acknowledged how unsettling the uncertainty was. “We also recognise the extraordinary work of the healthcare professionals who care for these children and families, in increasingly challenging circumstances,” chief executive Monica Briggs said in a statement reported by 1News.
With the election a little over a fortnight away, the shortage has become a campaign issue. Labour’s health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall said the delays showed how severe the staffing crisis had become. “For two years the Government has denied there has been a hiring freeze at Health NZ, while nurses have reported severe shortages and that they’re denied permission to fill vacant positions,” she said. Brown has called the hiring freeze claim false.
The row lands in the same week the Tertiary Education Commission told nursing schools to hold 2027 enrolments at 2025 levels because hospitals cannot find enough supervised placements for students. Chief executive Tim Fowler told Morning Report that nursing enrolments had risen about 30 per cent in six years, from around 8,000 to just over 11,000, and that 2025 enrolments were roughly 700 fewer than 2026. “We really are now at a point where we’ve got to manage the key rate limiting step for further enrolments which is the availability of clinical placements,” he said. The union’s primary health care college chair, Tracey Morgan, called the directive “counter-intuitive to what Aotearoa desperately needs in a health system in crisis”.
Starship is one of two centres in New Zealand’s national child cancer network, alongside Christchurch Hospital, and takes patients from across the upper North Island and the Pacific. Health New Zealand says seven more nurses will start on ward 27B over the next three months. Until then the ward’s roster, and the families waiting on it, depend on nurses borrowed from elsewhere in the hospital.
Have you or your family been affected by delays at Starship, or do you work in a ward that is running short? Share your experience in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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