Your hospital is safe, says Milne

DON'T WORRY: Wairarapa DHB chairman Derek Milne says there are no plans to close the hospital.PHOTO/FILE

There's no need to speculate about it, says Dr Derek Milne.

"As the new chairman of the Wairarapa District Health Board I want to immediately assure people that there are not plans or any desires to close the Wairarapa Hospital," he said in a letter to the Wairarapa Times-Age on Friday.

Dr Milne said he had noted the publicity - and the speculation - as problems surfaced at Wairarapa Hospital, and concern about patients being transferred to Wellington and elsewhere.

"A wide range of procedures are, and will continue to be, carried out at Wairarapa Hospital," he said. "But complicated surgery and cancer treatments are done at specialised units that larger hospitals have."

An example is children being sent to Starship Hospital in Auckland because it is the only hospital in the country able to treat them.

"Recently there has been publicity about problems that come about in our smaller hospital when important staff are not available, and patients have to be transferred to other hospitals for safety reasons.

"Also, from time to time, our hospital has to employ out-of-region specialised doctors part-time. Such arrangements are very expensive and not a long-term solution."

He said hospital staff work hard to avoid those situations, but it was a task now made easier by "increasing connections" between Hutt and Wellington.

"My appointment as deputy chair of the Capital and Coast District Health Board and [Carterton mayor] Ron Mark's appointment to the Hutt District Health Board are designed to help the connections.

"The ultimate aim is to have the entire health resources of the region available to all the people of the region on an even basis."

Dr Milne said Wairarapa gets the fourth highest amount of funding per citizen of any District Health Board. "This level of funding is because Wairarapa has a lot of elderly people and a lot of lower-income people. Capital and Coast gets only about 80 per cent of the Wairarapa funding per citizen."

He said the board's responsibility was to spend the relatively high funding it gets in the best way it can "to keep Wairarapa people healthly and well".