It’s a great publicity shot, for two cabinet ministers keen to persuade voters that they should be re-elected at the General Election just a few weeks hence.
Health Minister Simeon Brown is shown wielding a pair of scissors to cut the ribbon at a new medical centre in Lower Hutt.
Local MP MP Chris Bishop looks on approvingly, no doubt musing on how this might fortify his pitch for votes in South Hutt.
But it’s not a new facility for Health New Zealand. Riverside Medical is owned by husband and wife Dr Javier and Chantelle Stroud.
According to Chantelle: “People can’t get into a GP for quite some time, so this new facility we’ve built will hopefully help with that.”
Javier said almost 2000 patients had pre-enrolled, and the clinic would eventually have capacity for 12,000.
RNZ reports that a lack of GPs has created overflows at Lower Hutt’s after-hours care and other free health services – something the clinic hoped to reduce pressure on.
But from where does the new clinic expect to recruit the doctors to expand its services and treat more patients as its owners are planning?
Bishop and Brown both acknowledged a need for more primary care providers in the Hutt.
This year, RNZ noted, the government had invested $120m in primary care, while $180m was invested in 2025.
Brown said, “We are seeing more practices open their books to patients across the country, which is really important so patients can get that access that they need.
“It’s all about making sure the system delivers care closer to home and reduces pressure on the hospital.”
Talking about pressure on the hospital, let’s turn to the photo opportunity which Brown missed.
He could have turned up at Wellington Regional Hospital to observe medical staff dealing with a situation which generated the New Zealand Herald headline
Wellington Hospital called a ‘s***show’ as patients forced to wait 24 hours
This steered PoO to a report that said –
Patients presenting at Wellington Hospital’s Emergency Department have faced waiting times of more than 24 hours to be seen this month.
An ED nurse said that on a recent Monday night shift one man fell asleep and hit his head while waiting 12 hours to be seen.
Health Minister Simeon Brown hasn’t turned up to see for himself what’s going on.
But he said the situation in Wellington ED was unacceptable, “as it continued to be one of the lowest performing in the country”.
In other words, don’t blame him or his government for 24-hour waiting times. The staff are the culprits. They can’t meet their targets.
In internal Health NZ documents RNZ has seen, the agency said in early August that some patients exceeded 24-hour waits in ED, with high numbers of patients waiting more than six hours, because of medical bed shortages.
Hospitals throughout the country have a target that 95% of patients are admitted, discharged or transferred from an Emergency Department within six hours.
Latest results from Health NZ, between January and March 2026, show Capital and Coast hospitals only met that target 57.6% of the time.
A nurse said
“It’s just a s***show to work in at the moment. Lots of pressure.
“We’re getting high presentations, but the pressure’s coming from where we can’t get patients off to wards to free up our ED space, so that we can continue to see the new ones coming in.”
Further down the report, we are given a figure that suggests Brown has been unfair in saying the ED team is not up to snuff.
A Health NZ spokesperson said there were 27 fulltime nurse vacancies in the ED. In the coming months, 18 new nurses would come on board.
If a team is short of numbers because 27 members have been red-carded, criticising the errant players would be justified. But that is not the case here.
This led PoO to wonder when Brown had last visited the hospital, to see for himself what is going on.
Google told us there is no official or published total count of how many public hospitals Health Minister Simeon Brown has visited.
Brown himself has noted that he visits local health facilities and hospitals “up and down the country” as part of his ministerial duties, but an exact aggregate number has not been officially released or tracked in a public database.
We may suppose he did visit the hospital early last year (while suspecting he has not been there since).
He posted this on his X site at the time –
Click to view
And on January 24 2025, NZ Doctor reported he had visited other hospitals.
He was photographed having his blood pressure taken at a clinic in Ōtara, south Auckland.
A check on his blood pressure today would be instructive.
Bob Edlin is a veteran journalist and editor for the Point of Order blog HERE.
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