My offer to help improve Maori health care stands

To have an honest debate there needs be a modicum of respect, both for the adversary and the truth. Allan Anderson's column (Chronicle, October 21) has neither. Worse, he suffers from a lack of humour and of self-reflection. To address this would mean engaging in a food fight such as he has enjoyed for two years with Clive Solomon and the former mayor.

The result of that behaviour has been the tragedy of a dysfunctional DHB, for which Allan Anderson is partly responsible. I'm not going there, but I've got to ask by what antique chivalry does Allan Anderson declare Julie Patterson unable to defend herself? Surely respect for women means they can speak for themselves.

I do thank him for the necessity of further elaborating the issues I raised in my column.

Allan's effect may have been to distract and confuse, but the issues of mortality and of transparency, of commitment and leadership are too important to allow that to happen. In response to the mortality statistics comparing the various DHBs, I wrote that in my opinion the mortality statistics offered by the MOH were meaningless, but were potentially harmful to our DHB. I debunked those statistics and demonstrated why they were particularly useless when applied, as the MOH was apparently doing, to compare our DHB to others, or indeed any DHB to an imagined, fantasy average death rate, even a "standardised death rate".

I also called attention to the fact that the CEO, Mrs Patterson, had an apparent conflict of interest that accounted for her own unwillingness to educate the public about the false alarm generated by the MOH statistics. It's a failure I attribute to a lack of commitment to this community. She may, in accord with Allan's contention, pay rates on family property here but it says nothing about where she votes, or sleeps, or commits her heart.

The residence issue adds to concerns about her leadership, concerns reflected both in her ill-fated Wellington-inspired plan to put 400 pregnant woman at hazard, and in spending $9800-plus on outside-Wanganui legal opinions to try to block the votes of board members opposed. We learned then that Mr Anderson was considered a likely vote for the proposal. He was for it until pushed by political winds to vote against it.

Questions of commitment and leadership are important in that the mortality statistics that deserve to be of serious concern to this community and the nation are not the phony baloney peddled recently by the MOH.

They are the statistics on mortality rates for Maori as compared with non-Maori.

Statistics NZ data shows clearly that standardised mortality rates for non-Maori are roughly the same throughout the country, but rates for Maori are significantly higher and Maori mortality rates of our DHB rank them as the fourth highest in the country. Breaking those statistics down by disease categories demonstrates that cancer deaths in Maori women are higher than non-Maori, as are rates in men from cancer and heart disease.

"The persistently high Maori mortality rates, when controlled for social class, indicate that the poor state of Maori health cannot be explained solely by relative socio-economic disadvantage. The high Maori rate of potentially preventable deaths indicates that the health sector is still not meeting the serious health needs of many Maori." That is the conclusion of research from Christchurch and Wellington Medical Schools.

Last year I published five separate columns on this issue and offered recommendations for improvement of Maori Health Care. Have there been any improvements? Ms Patterson ought to tell us. My offer then to help the leadership of the hospital fell on the same deaf ears as failed to listen to the 4000 submissions on maternal health. The offer stands, just as I stand by my column.