Pharmac has not been performing well - no small matter when every Kiwi's life depends on it. Today it was announced its CEO, Sarah Fitt, has resigned, as confirmed by Pharmac's Board Chair Paula Bennett. As a general rule, to prescribe a drug, you must be a NZ registered Medical Practitioner. Neither Bennett not Fitt are, or ever have been, so its unlikely that between the two of them, they have ever done so. So the health of the nation has been put into the hands of two people - in charge of buying every drug we use - with neither of them being a doctor who has ever written prescriptions on a day-to-day basis.
Bennett is a former real estate agent, and got her job, it strongly appears, due to her links to National. Fitt has a Bachelor's degree in the UK in pharmacology, not medicine.
How come in Wellington the people at the top are not the right people?
\As several Kiwi industrialist-owners have told me, "when you have the wrong person at the top, nothing will ever work".
Its not the small fish in NZ who are problem, its the big fish who should've never got the jobs they're sitting in and won't go.
The PM should've never allowed the 20 to 30 names I've now accumulated to have been planted into the biggest jobs in the country when better hires were available.
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
2 comments:
I disagree with your assumption that the drug buying agency should be run by "prescribers" i.e. medical practitioners.
Buying medicines with a limited fund is quite different from writing prescriptions.
Pharmac has been a world respected agency for it's ability to get the best deal for the limited money they have allocated to them by the government.
Of course, one will hear howls of outrage from time to time, when some person cannot get their particular drug funded. But this is the exception. By and large the vast majority of (life saving) medicines in New Zealand are fully funded.
Come on Professor! Experience in drug prescription is good when you run a pharmacy not a drug bring agency. One good point there though - a wrong person on the top is a recipe for failure.
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