Letters: Bang on, Wayne Brown

Far North Mayor Wayne Brown

I have often disagreed with Wayne Brown over a lot of things, but his letter to the editor on January 11 (A new model of health care) hit the nail right on the head.

His analysis of the problems we face in the North, plus many other small centres, is utterly to the point.

Why can't we look around at who delivers the best health system for a country which is so diverse in just about everything you care to name, and pick a health system that works well and introduce it here? We have wonderful nurses, doctors and specialists, and our own little hospital could do so much more, as we have great, experienced staff.

We are so top heavy with DHBs and management, and so many of them. Surely we could pick who is doing it right and stick with it? It always comes down to a new Health Minister and things go around again with changes. It needs to stop, and start delivering properly managed health care from the bottom to the top.

The management seem to be the ones who get all the pay rises, and the dedicated people who do the hands-on grass roots work don't. What on Earth is so hard about finding a system that works that we can't manage to do it?

Wayne Brown has some salient points that would do well to be looked at by the powers that be, and take some of it in instead of just casting ideas aside because they don't come from the sitting health board members and government.

Because someone becomes Health Minister doesn't mean they know everything about the position, so widen the search to improve what we have, and let's ditch the idea that we need so many health boards.

IT is very good, but it has a lot to answer for when things go wrong, which it seems to have been doing quite a bit of in the last few years. We need to use this technology, as is suggested, to benefit these smaller towns and start reducing the waiting lists to a more reasonable wait time.

Of course it would help if people stopped having so many traffic accidents, which knock back waiting lists, but we will always have idiots, so we need to deal with it.

INTERESTED
Cooper's Beach