Older people are more likely to end up in retirement facilities in New Zealand than in any other country. In the first of a five-part investigation, Simon Collins and Martin Johnston examine the standard of our care for the aged.
Full rest home and private hospital audit reports will be published online from tomorrow in a six-month trial to see whether people read them.
Associate Health Minister Jo Goodhew, announcing the trial in August, said the reports were "quite technical" and she did not want to spend money on editing them for online publication unless people read them.
"These reports are usually 100 pages and require considerable redaction of information which might identify individual staff members or residents," she said.
"As this comes at a cost of considerable time, I have agreed to a six-month trial to see how many people bother to read those 100-page reports, and then we'll make a decision on whether we commit the resources to redacting each one of them."
