Editorial: Minister spot on for 'spying' on hospitals

Tony Ryall. Photo / Supplied

Every week, Government ministers are deluged with official facts and figures relating to their portfolios. Wading through them can be a daunting task. Even then, they may not tell quite the full story.

The one voice missing from most of these reports is that of John and Janet Citizen. That is why there is little reason to criticise Health Minister Tony Ryall's surprise visits to hospital emergency departments.

The minister says it is important for him to see first-hand what is happening. That is self-evident. No area can reflect quite so badly on a government as that of health, and this one raised the ante when it made an election promise to cut emergency waiting times.

It has set a target of 95 per cent of patients being seen, treated, admitted or discharged within six hours. Mr Ryall is obviously keen to ensure that progress is being made.

Predictably, he has not won universal acclaim for his policy of making spot checks of how long people have been waiting "if I'm in a city or a town and I've got a spare five or 10 minutes". Former Labour Health Minister Annette King has accused him of spying, while staff in emergency departments variously described the technique as "insulting and undermining" and "creepy and weird".

Notably, however, the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists had few concerns. Ian Powell, the executive director, spoke of a "storm in a tea-cup". That was a welcome statement. Statistics can often reveal weaknesses in practices or procedures.

Sometimes, however, it pays to get behind the numbers.

Getting a patient's perspective is an obvious way of doing that. It can confirm that progress is being made, or that the facts and figures are an inadequate reflection of what is going on.

The latter has been a problem in Britain, where the health regulator, the Care Quality Commission, has begun spot checks of hospitals after a television documentary claimed 60 per cent were providing it with inaccurate information. One such spot check uncovered soiled mattresses, poor clinical practices, mould growing in suction machines and outdated medical equipment.

No one is suggesting that hospitals in this country are supplying inaccurate data to the Government. Nor is there any suggestion that the information gleaned by Mr Ryall will be a significant factor in the formulation of policy.

He surely recognises that this is a far from scientific means of gaining an impression of emergency departments. Indeed, the minister has played down the importance of the unannounced visits himself, saying there have been fewer than a handful. There is no suggestion that he will draw too many conclusions from them.

Nonetheless, they are undoubtedly useful. Much of the information that passes over Mr Ryall's desk will, of necessity, be self-assessment by hospitals.

It is always risky to accept this at face value, and the health system has checks built into it. This should bring any discrepancies to the surface. But it does no harm whatsoever for Mr Ryall to gather the broadest of pictures by talking to patients first-hand about their experiences.

Indeed, it would be helpful for other ministers to copy the practice. Mr Ryall suggests that what he is doing is not unprecedented.

Chris Carter, he says, dropped unannounced into schools while he was the previous Government's Education Minister. If so, that undermines any criticism of spot checks by the Labour Party.

It also reinforces the fact that other ministers might well adopt the practice. The benefits would be immediate. Surely, for example, those with tax queries would no longer be kept hanging on the telephone for an insufferable time if the minister responsible actually put in a call to the Inland Revenue Department.