At 11:59pm on Tuesday 15 February New Zealand officially moved into Phase 2 of the Omicron Response framework

This means that positive cases need to self-isolate for 10 days (can self-release after day 10 if no symptoms for 72 hours).

Close contacts need to quarantine for seven days (test on day five)

RAT testing acceptable with PCR follow-up

Critical Service Businesses – Vet Clinics Eligible

Vet clinics who’re registered as a Critical Service, vaccinated team members can actually continue to work provided they’re asymptomatic.

The registration process is being facilitated by MBIE and you can find it by going to businessconnect.govt.nz.   You’ll need your REALME login to register.

Eligibility to use RATs from Government Supplies

Registering as a critical business means your team can access RATs from Government supplies.

To use RATs as part of the scheme you must be an asymptomatic close contact.

As you probably already know, the symptoms are:

• new or worsening cough
• sneezing and runny nose
• fever
• temporary loss of smell or altered sense of taste
• sore throat
• shortness of breath

There are authorised RAT suppliers nationwide.  To find out where you can get your RAT supplies visit healthpoint.co.nz – there’s a search option there by location.   Once you enter your location a list of pharmacies shows up.

Unvaccinated Team Members

Not all clinics have mandated that all employees must be vaccinated.

If you’re in a clinic where there’s a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated, I believe – life according to Julie – you’ll need to have a different plan to a clinic that’s 100% vaccinated.

Why?

Because the Phase 2 critical worker conditions are applicable only to VACCINATED WORKERS.

Which means that when an unvaccinated team member is deemed a close contact THEY MUST ISOLATE AT HOME.

Whereas a vaccinated close contact can still come to work.

Everyone needs to consider how they’re all going to support each other – vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Clinics with unvaccinated employees are likely to be hit harder by staff shortages because only vaccinated employees will be able to work through an isolation period.

Apart from attendance considerations you need to plan around – how you’re going to stay open and function – the other thing is to formulate is how you’re going to pay people if / when they’re sick.

Sick Leave Payments (or not)

It’s highly likely that Omicron is going to seriously eat into people’s sick leave entitlements.

If an employee has Covid-19 and is unwell, they’ll be able to use any sick leave entitlement that they have.

Given that the Holidays Act provides for only 10 days of sick leave per year, this may not be enough to cover the whole period.

Any further absence due to sickness would then be unpaid unless the employee’s employment agreement provides otherwise, or the employer agrees to continue payment.

It becomes especially tricky where the employee isn’t actually unwell, but they’re required to remain away from their clinic as a result of Government mandates.

General Legal Principle

There’s a general legal principle that an employer is required to pay an employee if they are “ready, willing and able” to work.

In recent cases brought by employees who couldn’t work from home during the lockdowns, the Employment Relations Authority found that the employers were obliged to continue paying employees in this context because they were available for work despite the fact that the employers couldn’t provide it.

The same principle will likely apply where a vet clinic requests that an employee stays away from the clinic based on their own risk assessment, as opposed to a government mandated requirement.

In this instance the clinic would need to continue payment unless otherwise agreed. Further, the clinic cannot direct the employee to take annual leave unless they had complied with the requirement to give 14 days’ notice.

Isn’t able to attend work?

The situation is different where the workplace remains open and the employer can provide work – as in the case of being registered as a critical workplace – but the employee isn’t able to attend due to self-isolation or quarantine requirements.

While this scenario hasn’t yet been considered by the courts, the legal opinion is it’s strongly arguable that the employer would not have to pay the employee as they’re not “ready, willing and able” to work.

Leave Support Scheme

Regarding support payments – it appears that Work and Income still has the Leave Support Scheme up and running.   Although whether this is still going to apply going forward when more people are going to be impacted, who knows?

You can find out more about this at workandincome.govt.nz and check out the covid 19 resources.

Vet Clinic Experience of Covid-19 Positive Employee

If you don’t visit the NZVC website very often you may not realise there’s a whole bunch of resources there for clinics that are updated in a pretty timely manner and available for anyone to access.

One of those resources is feedback from a clinic that had a positive covide-19 case in one of its team members.    In this case, there were several other staff members who were designated as being close contacts which meant they too, had to isolate.

The clinic implemented good quality infection control processes and procedures.

They used appropriate PPE (including KN95 masks) which they believe helped to limit the impacts on the wider team and business operations.

Workplace bubbles and physical distancing, where possible, limited the number of staff who were designated as close contacts.

Lunchrooms and tea rooms

Often overlooked were tea and break rooms.   These are spaces where people will always be considered close contacts of an infected person.

Coopetition

If you haven’t thought of meeting with other vet clinics near you to come up with a Plan C – that’s the plan that kicks in if you cannot manage your Plan B independently of another clinic to stay in business – then now’s the time to do that.

Yes – in normal times that clinic down the road is more than likely your direct competitor.   But we’ve been out of normal for two years now and the normal we’re in now is going to change yet again.

There’s a term called co-optition – it’s short for cooperative competition.

Recent examples of cooptition

Recent examples of this are Pfizer and BioNTech to develop one of the Covid vaccines.

Back in 2019 Samsung and Apple – bitter arch enemies formed what’s been dubbed as the Unthinkable Partnership – to deliver Apple content on Samsung TVs.

So if you haven’t done it already I really recommend neighbourhood clinics get together to think about a strategy that enables y’all to stay in business through 2022 without any casualties.

VetStaff does more than recruitment

With NZs borders opening up, VetStaff has upped the ante on its international marketing campaigns again.

Unless you run a VPN it’s unlikely you’ll see what we’re up to because they’re running in the Northern Hemisphere.

We’ve targeted just about every country there’s a veterinary science degree that’s recognised by the NZVC for full registration.

If you’d like to benefit from these campaigns get in touch because clinics that are registered with us exclusively get first dibs on interviewing these vets after we’ve done all their interviews and background checks.

Digital Marketing

Actually, talking about digital marketing campaigns – last year I received an invitation from a PR and digital marketing agency to attend a podcasting lunch.   It was how to use podcasts for digital marketing.

Even though I’ve been podcasting since long before podcasting was even a recognised term, I thought I’d go along because I’m always up for learning new things and ways.

It turns out that this digital marketing agency doesn’t actually have a podcast of their own but they thought they’d still run this lunchtime workshop and bring in a sound technician to talk about the techy stuff.

Because we were still in lockdown they ended up running a webinar instead of an in-person event.  Someone in the audience asked how much it’d cost for this agency to start a podcast for their small business.

They threw some numbers around – it turns out that if you used this digital marketing agency that believes in podcasting so much that they don’t even have a show of their own – and you wanted to run a weekly podcast like Paws Claws Wet Noses – it’d cost in the region of $2,000 per episode.

Wow!   And that’s just to create the show – the promotion of it is additional.

Last week this very same PR & digimarketing agency got in touch with me again.

They politely asked how my podcast was going and then asked whether they could buy an hour of my time because they’d been approached by a vet clinic that wanted this agency to run a digital marketing campaign to attract vets.

This agency wanted to make sure they got the “voice” right.

They said that if I share what I know they’ll be sure to recommend VetStaff as the recruitment agency to their clients.

I gotta say I was a bit shocked and surprised.   Why would a vet clinic go to a PR and digital marketing agency and not come to us?

Obviously, they thought all we did was flick CVs off to appropriate clinics when we received them.

This vet clinic – and maybe your vet clinic as well – doesn’t know that for us – when a clinic works with us because they want to be seen as an employer of choice – we do a whole bunch more than flick a CV.

When a clinic wants to work with us we do the digital marketing campaigns for you.

You don’t need to hire a swanky really high priced PR agency to run a campaign for you – where they’ll charge you for the market research they’ll have to undertake to do it right – we can do that for you.

We’re working with some fantastic clinics in this way right now.   We’d love to have the opportunity to work with you too.  If this sounds like something you’d like to do then please get in touch.

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