Minister of Health Dr Shane Reti receives a flu vaccination from The Fono nurse director Moana Manukaia.
Minister of Health Dr Shane Reti receives a flu vaccination from The Fono nurse director Moana Manukaia.
EDITORIAL
The Government’s response to Health New Zealand’s crisis was like watching a re-run of the American medical drama ER.
The programme ran for 15 seasons and helped launch several Hollywood careers, including that of George Clooney. ER also won a box-load of awards as it followed doctorsand nurses in the ER at the County General Hospital in Chicago grappling with ups and downs in their personal and professional lives, also dealing with hospital bureaucrats while trying to give appropriate medical care to patients.
George Clooney starred in ER. Photo / AP
Health Minister Dr Shane Reti’s press conference last week where he announced that he had sacked the Health NZ board – there were only two members left and both their terms were due – should have been held in the Middlemore Hospital, South Auckland, A&E, complete with overflowing patients (as extras) with and some even requiring urgent medical assistance and procedures.
The Northland GP who rolled up his sleeves during the Covid lockdown should have taken a leaf from Clooney’s book and came out looking like a star, had he not put part of the blame for this crisis on the number of new nurses onboarded.
Reti’s sacking of the board was a bold step from a frustrated Health Minister who claimed he had little visibility across this behemoth called Health NZ and was not aware of how the health giant was overspending by $130 million a month.
That’s the part that will have most New Zealanders perplexed. How can smart bosses and calculator-holding budget-holders not know of huge blowouts like $130m month after month? Surely someone is accountable and it’s not a board member who does not have that type of financial delegation.
The Health Ministry and Reti receive weekly data updates on staffing levels and financials, and the idea that too many nurses is partly to blame for this crisis is either (a) a fact or (b) a surprise or (c) not known to them.
Reti said New Zealanders requiring healthcare are sick of wait times and this was now a major priority for this Government. Wait times for surgery, wait times for specialists, wait time for scans and even wait times to your GP were weighing heavy on this Government. But for all those years on ER, the emergency waiting room was never empty, because people keep getting sick.
Sacking the last two Health NZ board members, whose time was up anyway, was good optics but more a consequence of the fallout and hardly an anaemia for the bloated bureaucratic health system.
So the Health NZ board is gone and replaced with Commissioner Lester Levy, a longtime National fix-it man, on a 12-month appointment.
Levy will appoint two deputies, as Health NZ looks to take the sick making decisions to the regions.
Those three musketeers – Levy and his two deputies – will have a mammoth task and might just need a Hollywood scriptwriter to find that happy ever after ending.
