Barry Soper: Ethnicity no longer factor in waiting list a fair outcome for all

It’s not often in this business that you can sit back with some satisfaction and feel justified a year later that a story you broke resulted in an outcome fair to all.

The formal part ethnicity played in hospital waiting lists caused a political storm.

It was justified by the then Labour Government whose Health Minister Ayesha Verrall said she was happy with the policy that gave Māori and Pasifika patients priority over Pākehā and other ethnicities.

The electorally sensitive Prime Minister at the time Chris Hipkins said there was clear evidence Māori and Pasifika, rural people and those living in low-income communities have had to wait longer for care.

But then he told Verrall to make sure the discrimination that already existed wasn’t replaced by another discriminatory tool.

That was in fact happening until the lists were made public which detailed the points allocated to those waiting for surgery, and that was discriminatory.

Those at the pit face of the policy, many surgeons, were not only unhappy with the policy, they rightly argued they didn’t study long and hard to give priority to any one ethnicity, ahead of others.

There was only one criterion, they believe, that should be at the forefront of treatment and that’s need.

Health NZ, after the story broke, and no doubt after a ticking off from the Government, ordered a review of the policy that found that while it was “legally and ethically justifiable it didn’t follow best practice”. In other words, it appears, they conceded that people were being bumped up the list ahead of those who had in many cases, waited longer for the same operation.

And we’re not talking a few months, we’re talking well over a year for non-urgent surgery.

Even though the internal review recommended that hospitals, not already factoring in ethnicity, should not use the priority system, others could continue with it, it seemed.

The southern region and Northland had already stopped using the system and the massive Auckland catchment will now do the same, and rightly so.

The current Health Minister Shane Reti stated the bleedingly obvious - clinical decisions should be made on health need first.

The message seems to have hit home at the bloated Health NZ which now says a fundamental relook at the system is required.

One of their gloriously anonymous spokespeople there was quoted as saying that they will now look into the possibility of adopting a new prioritisation tool across the whole health system, but emphasised no decisions had been made.

The decision shouldn’t be too difficult to make; give health care to those who need it first, rather than expecting them to jockey for position on a waiting list based on their ancestry.

Barry Soper is a New Zealand political journalist, and has been featured regularly on radio and television since the 1970s. Currently, Soper's main role is political editor at Newstalk ZB, a radio network in New Zealand.