Kate Hawkesby: Alarming new data on vaping

So we got new data yesterday on vaping, and it's nothing short of alarming.  

We here in NZ are among the biggest vapers in the developed world. The OECD found 8.2% of people aged 15 or older regularly vape in New Zealand, which puts us in second place, just behind Estonia.  

I was speaking to a specialist cardio sonographer the other day, and she was telling me that she thinks we’re going to find out down the track that vaping is worse than smoking. We just don't have enough research on it yet, but the toxins you're inhaling when you're vaping... no good can come of that. 

Kate Hawkesby: I fear the vaping epidemic horse has bolted

The vaping epidemic in this country really grinds my gears, because it was all so avoidable.

We let the horse bolt, for years, and then sat on our hands until it well and truly took hold, until every school in the country, alongside thousands of parents, were all crying out for legislation and restrictions around it – until we took it seriously.

And then we set up endless committees, reviews, and inquiries around it – only to tell us what we already knew – it was a major problem.

Josie Pagani: Yes minister, health is in crisis

The crisis in our health service is worthy of a crisis response, but it's not getting it, Rob Campbell, the sacked Health New Zealand-Te Whatu Ora chair, said this week.

I went to hear him speak in Wellington, drawn perhaps to a heretic because heresy usually has the most profound observations.

Decades ago, Rob Campbell was the darling of the left, a charismatic unionist with the intellect to take apart the establishment. From unions, he became a champion of an economy in which markets are made to work for the people.

It is revealing what people do when their leadership jobs end.

Mike Hosking: Health issues are going to sink this government

Health, as it so often has over the years, is shaping up to be a nightmare for the Government come election time.

Yesterday's Emergency Department numbers, that were so farcical no one believes them, ends a couple of weeks of absolute disaster for a Government that will go to the vote with nothing more than an ideological rejig of head office to show for hundreds of millions of dollars in upheaval.

Bob Jones: Our catastrophic health crises

Over five years ago, Waikato University proposed launching a medical school and promptly came under heavy attack from then Auckland uni’ Vice-Chancellor Professor Stuart McCutcheson.

Stuart branded the proposal an “ill-considered folly,” but acknowledging the then dire situation with grossly insufficient GPs being produced for New Zealand’s needs, and particularly the rural districts.

At the time we’d not increased our output of new GPs for some years and were reliant on importing foreign doctors; mainly from India, while our population was rising annually thanks to immigration. Of the doctors currently registered in New Zealand, an astonishing 45% are foreign imports, a percentage massively higher than any OECD nation, however, only a third remain here after 3 years. More significantly, they often lack understanding of New Zealand culture.

Kate Hawkesby: It's not right that we have to stop and think about what healthcare is available to us

 

I think one of the great travesties of this Government, when we eventually look back on their long line of failures, will be what happened to mental health.

Don’t get me wrong, no government from what I can see, has ever got mental health right, it’s forever been a sector in dire straits, under resourced and woefully misunderstood.

But mental health itself has only become bigger and worse as the years has gone by, and arguably peaking as a real crisis now, post the pandemic.

Kate Hawkesby: Health NZ acknowledging issues and mistakes doesn't actually fix them

 

It probably comes as no surprise to any of us who watched on from the confines of our homes as the Ministry of Health bungled its way through Covid, that they’ve just discovered a ’coding error’. 

It means the number of hospitalisations they recorded was not, in fact, accurate. 

Turns out when they said just over 14,000 people were hospitalised with Covid, they meant almost 19,500. 

Whoops. 

Ian Powell: Colossal ‘porkies’ and band-aids don’t’ make a health workforce plan

On 1 August Minister of Health Andrew Little announced what he described as the start of a plan for the beleaguered workforce in Aotearoa New Zealand’s health system: Government’s 5 year late health workforce announcement.

In October 2017, when Labour became government with its two coalition parties, it inherited a health workforce crisis from the previous National-led government. As a consequence of a high level of inaction, partly due to a misplaced faith in restructuring as the solution, the situation has unfortunately further deteriorated.

Kate Hawkesby: Start investing in our health system now, or it'll only get worse

 

I note the average time to wait to get in to see your GP is three weeks. That’s the average. For many it’s longer than that.

And for some rural areas in this country, you’d be hard pressed to see a GP at all, far less one close to you. You may have to drive for miles to get to even get to one. So we know it’s a problem, but how to fix it?

President of the Royal NZ College of GP’s, Samantha Murton, wrote a piece for the Herald yesterday saying how it’s not an easy fix. “We can’t magic away the chronic GP shortage”, she said.

Point of Order: GPs get a good dose of Little’s rhetoric

And a reassurance that there will be a better tomorrow

Just as you we failed to find the word “democracy” in the PM’s speech to the Local Government New Zealand this week, so the word “crisis” was absent from the Health Minister’s speech to the General Practitioners conference today.

Andrew Little did acknowledge the enormous pressure that “present circumstances” are putting on GPs and their practices.

Kerre Woodham: Andrew Little is an absolute disgrace

Last night, the youngest in our household had an ear infection.

Nothing could ease it, even with the Pamol.

We rang the A&E clinics and were told to prepare for a one and half to two hour wait on a Monday night, which was as expected and then all of a sudden the tears stopped and she was fine, probably because it had burst.

We were taking it in turns to make the phone calls and you could just hear the exhaustion and frustration and despair and the voices of those who answered and thank heavens they answered the phone. Thank you for doing that.

I can't even begin to imagine just how frustrating it is to turn up to work and to know that you're in for a long, hard night ahead. You want to do your best for people; you want to be able to help them but you've been so slammed you simply cannot.

And then you have Andrew Little, Denier-in-Chief, talking to Mike Hosking asking and saying crisis, what crisis? As he has done so throughout.

Kate Hawkesby: I'd have thought, at this time of year we'd be doing more to help the health system

 

The health system crisis is the cost of living crisis all over again isn't it?

Doesn't this have a familiar ring to it?

A government in denial of something existing, which is laid bare for all to see, in broad daylight, in every part of our community, and yet politicians heads are firmly in the sand.

Nothing to see here.

Garrick Tremain: Health crisis

 Here is Garrick Tremain's cartoon commentary on democracy, voting and health crisis.