A new hospital is being built in the middle of town. An immediate response might be "wonderful" or "about time" or " I hope the traffic doesn’t snarl up".
The next, more considered, response might be: what might the new hospital spawn or catalyse? How do we make the most of this huge capital injection? What are the risks to avoid and the opportunities to seize?
Answering those questions has been the role of the local advisory group, which was set up immediately after the 2017 general election. This group comprises the health system locally and centrally, leaders of the city and the region, Ngai Tahu, Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency, the University of Otago, Otago Polytechnic, Business South, Kainga Ora, representatives of Otago and Southland mayors, and anyone else who we think might add a bit of value.
The local advisory group has no budget, takes no formal decisions and exercises no authority. It is a clearing house, a forum to swap ideas and a safe place to shoot the breeze. If a plan of action seems sensible then it gets acted on by the relevant organisations. Some ideas work, some don’t.
From the outset the local advisory group, along with many others, has asked the question: how will we build such a large facility in a small city a long way from a large pool of labour? Of course, that question can be easily reframed from the opposite perspective: the Government is building us a new hospital. How do we maximise the economic and social benefit to local businesses and workers?
Progress is being made. The Government is funding a new trade training centre at Otago Polytechnic, due for completion next year. The Otago Chamber of Commerce, now Business South, hosted a group of businesses and agencies to research the labour supply and labour demand in the region. The response to that research was to establish a skills hub called Workforce Central Dunedin.
Workforce Central Dunedin is still in its infancy because construction of the first building, outpatients, has only recently begun. It has engaged with schools, firms, non-governmental organisations and government agencies across the region, to ensure that people know what skills are likely to be needed when, and to encourage people to consider construction as a career choice, especially underrepresented groups such as Maori and Pasifika business, the disability sector, or women.
A year from now we can expect Workforce Central Dunedin to be hard at it. There will be new hires to induct, in partnership with contractors or subcontractors; there will be identified skills shortages to address; and there will already be recruitment challenges and retention challenges. There will be career planning to facilitate, suicide prevention courses to arrange and leaders to identify and support. Local businesses will need to be supported, often just with timely information. Workforce Central Dunedin will need to think outside the square about engaging the prisoner or ex-prisoner workforce, and how to tap the casual student workforce.
Workforce Central Dunedin will work best if it partners for help with social agencies, government departments, local business and the main contractors. It is getting that help. To date there is no shortage of moral support, financial support, in kind or practical support.
For all that support, Workforce Central Dunedin will only ever be partly successful.
This is because, especially during the peak construction period on the large inpatients building, we expect we will have to import labour from the North Island, the Philippines, Ireland, wherever. To the extent we need to import workers we will need to be able to provide them with housing.
Of course, some of the workforce that the project will need is already living and working in Dunedin.
The University of Otago’s new Faculty of Dentistry (often known as the dental school) and the new Te Rangihiroa residential college in Albany St are recent construction projects, and there is the new ACC building and the Hillside redevelopment to complete in the next year or so.
If we can get this right we will have grown a construction workforce that will subsequently meet the needs of other local construction projects, especially at the university, or can help meet the specialist needs of other hospital builds elsewhere in New Zealand.
We will have introduced more women to construction, grown local businesses including Maori and Pasifika businesses, reduced the unemployment rate still further, reduced the recidivism rate at the prison and reduced the reliance on imported labour.
