Doctors confront minister on hiring freeze that 'should not be happening'

• "Not true" that hiring freeze not affecting frontline, say psychiatrists

• Mental Health Minister says mental health services "a priority"

• Offers to intervene where recruitment efforts blocked

Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey insists the hiring freeze at Health New Zealand/Te Whatu Ora should not be affecting mental health services, and has vowed to step in personally where that is the case.

Following his speech to the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists conference in Wellington on Wednesday morning, the minister was asked why politicians continued to deny there was a hiring freeze, when some frontline services were having recruitment efforts blocked.

Doocey said the issue was raised at a Parliamentary select committee in recent weeks at which both he and Health NZ chief executive Margie Apa "re-affirmed" there was "no impact on recruitment or training for mental health workforce".

"Let's be very clear about that - it [mental health] is a priority and there is no impact," he told the audience of about 200 delegates, some of whom shook their heads in apparent disbelief and started murmuring to each other.

The minister's claim was immediately challenged by the college's New Zealand chair, Dr Hiran Thabrew, a clinician at Starship Children's Hospital

"We have been impacted directly - we've lost a couple of people who wanted to join our team, so that's not true."

Doocey offered to raise that with Health NZ.

"We've made our expectation very clear for it not to impact, and I've got the chief executive, Margie Apa, on record in the media saying it's not impacting.

"So if there are specific issues, I'm happy to take them away and raise them because that should not be happening."

Thabrew asked whether the government would be honouring its pre-election promise to increase the number of psychiatrists, as the workforce crisis was reaching critical levels.

The minister said the government was committed to boosting the mental health workforce overall by 500 a year, with plans to fund more training places for psychiatrists, internships for clinical psychologists and the introduction of new qualifications for assistant psychologists.

Officials were currently working on the first-ever workforce plan for mental health, setting out the training pipeline, with psychiatry as "the focus", he said.