Simeon Brown: Putting the patient first

Initiatives announced this week underscore the Government’s commitment to fix New Zealand’s broken healthcare system, Health Minister Simeon Brown says.

“We are relentlessly focused on improving health outcomes and ensuring Kiwis have access to timely, quality healthcare.

HDPA: Andrew Little is having a laugh pretending he didn't know about health system woes

 

Andrew Little has got to be having a laugh if he’s trying to pretend he didn’t know our health system was going to melt down like it is at the moment.

Because that’s essentially what his office is trying to do. 

They’re claiming they didn’t know about a letter that was sent a year ago warning of exactly this.

In that letter, the DHBs asked the Government to fix the immigration system so they could get overseas workers in and so they wouldn’t lose migrant staff back overseas.

Kate Hawkesby: I've seen first hand how swamped our health system is

 

Like a lot of parents I imagine at the moment, I got the call up to the school sick bay yesterday to collect my daughter. Not another respiratory virus thank goodness, but a shoulder injury. School suggested I take her to A&E or a doctor to check it out.

Now anyone who has been sick lately, or paying attention to the news, knows that now is not the time to try to see a doctor or try to get into an ED. So I waited to lay eyes on my daughter to see how bad it was, because if we could avoid attempting to see a health professional at the moment that'd be preferable. But as soon as I saw my daughter with her arm in a sling and the state of her pain, I knew we needed to get an expert opinion and possibly an ultrasound or X-ray. 

Kate Hawkesby: Things are dire at Starship

 

If I had a dollar for every parent contacting me about the state of things at Starship, I could make a large donation to the Hospital.

It's dire in there at the moment. There’s a severe lack of funding, staff, beds, you name it, they’re screaming out for it.

I just can’t fathom how the country’s only specialist children’s hospital can be so over run and in such dire need… and yet the government does nothing. I know it’s a DHB issue, and that model's questionable to say the least in terms of the way it handles funding, but it still doesn’t make sense to me that it can get this woeful, and the only thing propping it up is private donors.

NZCPR Weekly: COVID-19 – two weeks on

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

This week we examine the new information that is emerging about COVID-19, our NZCPR Guest Commentator Frank Newman looks into the economic consequences of the virus outbreak and the Government’s response, and our poll asks whether you you believe that New Zealand’s health service could cope with a widespread outbreak of COVID-19.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
*To register for the NZCPR Weekly mailing list, click HERE. 

 

Nicholas Kerr from the US: Charlie Gard and the need for limited government

A few days after our first child was born, our pediatrician commented at a check-up, “Isn’t it funny that last week you’d never even met Penelope, and now you’d lay down in front of a bus for her?” 

I recalled this as I followed the tragic story of 10-month-old Charlie Gard who suffers from a rare genetic condition. Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) determined that nothing could be done to save him, but his parents wanted to try an experimental treatment in the United States. His doctors did not believe this was in Charlie’s best interests, took the case to court, and won. His parents exhausted all their appeals last week and it appears Charlie will soon be taken off life support.

Matt Ridley from the UK: Nobody knows how best to tackle obesity

Even optimists admit that some things are undoubtedly getting worse: things like traffic jams, apostrophe use — and obesity. The fattening of the human race, even in middle-income countries, is undeniable. “Despite sustained efforts to tackle childhood obesity, one in three adolescents is still estimated to be overweight or obese in Europe,” said a report last week to the World Health Organisation. That means more diabetes and possibly a reversal of the recent slow fall in age-adjusted cancer and heart disease death rates.

Perhaps we should remind ourselves first that it is a good problem to have, a symptom of abundance. 

Jeremy Sammut: Affordable health and ageing policy in Singapore

The Abbott government's decision to trim minister's titles has been criticised by commentators concerned that important issues, like population ageing, are no longer clearly tagged as portfolio responsibilities.

There is no doubting the policy challenges posed by the unprecedented ageing of the population in areas such as health and aged care. However, critics of the decision not to a have a designated 'Minister for Ageing' ignore the much bigger issue. The ability of governments to address ageing depends on the fiscal capacity to undertake ageing-related initiatives. Some countries are better equipped financially to do so than others.