Francesca Rudkin: The Government would've been hoping for a better report card

Saturday marked a year since the new heath system Te Whatu Ora kicked into gear. Twenty district health boards were abolished and replaced with a centralised system aimed at getting rid of our postcode lottery of health care.  

A year ago, I wished the then Minister of Health Andrew Little good luck with his venture. Our health system had been under pressure way before the pandemic hit, and clearly needed an overhaul.  I liked the fact the government was taking a big swing at this and trying to make sure that New Zealander’s, regardless of where they lived, got the same services and healthcare. Us Kiwis love fairness!  

But, for all the good intentions it turns out making changes as large as this, off the back of a pandemic which had further reduced an already depleted work force, may not have been such a great idea. Nor does it seem the transition was as considered or well executed as well as it needed to be.  

A year later, it’s not obvious what has changed – except the automatic signature on the bottom of their email, as one specialist told me.

Association of Salaried Specialists executive director Sarah Dalton said the union was giving Te Whatu Ora a mark of two out of five so far.  

She told me yesterday on the Sunday Session, “There are significant workforce shortages, there are gaps that are simply not being filled and acute demand just keeps getting higher and higher. Which, in turn, is making it really difficult to deliver the planned care."

There was a great article in the NZ Herald over the weekend from senior investigative journalist Alex Spencer, looking into the state of our A&E's and work place conditions. I saw this first hand recently. 

My son and I visited Auckland Hospital Emergency Department a few weeks back and after a wait of 5 and a half hours, the doctor was very apologetic. As were we; we didn’t want to be clogging up the system. My son got excellent care, but when I asked the doctor if the wait time was normal, he unleashed an exhausted and frustrated monologue about wait times, how long it takes to get a bed in a ward, the lack of staff, and the pressure on the system. His final words were “Make sure you use your vote wisely this election.”  

I’ve thought about that doctor often since that night. It was an unexpected and startling moment of candour. What are we doing to these people? We can’t afford to be driving doctors away.  

From what I’ve been told, Te Whatu Ora has not worked hard enough or quickly enough to get staff on side, to fill the staffing shortages, to fix the postcode lottery, shorten surgery and GP wait times, give emergency departments some relief or provide adequate mental health services.  

No one expects them to have solved all these problems in a year. We understand this is a massive undertaking and it will take time to see results, and yet when those in the system, at the frontline, are saying they see very little change it only seems fair to question the idea and the execution.  

Either way, several months out from an election, the government would have been hoping for a better report card than 2 out of 5.  

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