22/10/2025
The Auckland University Medical Student Association (AUMSA) stands in solidarity with current and future colleagues, recognising the immense challenges facing Aotearoa’s health system. The coordinated national strike on 23 October involves over 100,000 doctors, nurses, midwives, allied health workers, and teachers; the largest coordinated strike to date. It reflects the widespread concern among healthcare professionals who have dedicated their lives to serving our communities.
Whilst AUMSA acknowledges industrial action is the last resort, the decisions of tens of thousands of committed, dedicated, and passionate health professionals to strike underscores the height, width, and depth of pressures confronting our workforce. Issues including infrastructural inefficiency, resource limitations, chronic understaffing, burnout and career stagnation, are directly attributable to reduced patient outcomes.The challenges for today’s practitioners will define the environments that future doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals must operate within.
As future healthcare professionals, we feel we hold a unique voice in this conversation. We see and experience first-hand the pressures within our hospitals and clinics. Hence, we share the call for meaningful change toward a health system that is safe, equitable, and sustainable for both patients and providers. It is inevitable that no sector will remain unaffected should we fail to take meaningful action.
AUMSA therefore supports the broader movement for systemic reform, addressing the root causes of workforce strain ensuring an equitable, resilient, and compassionate health system for the future of Aotearoa now and into the future.
