Alexander (Sandy) Milne

IT is 13 days since I met Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters following his address to community leaders at the Baptist church on September 20.  

During this time, I have been endeavouring to update myself on progress in efforts to reverse the privatisation and centralisation (downgrading) of services for diagnosing infectious disease, which I will include in a presentation Mr Peters has invited me to send him.  

Mr Peters’ secretary, Ashley Stuart, has kept in touch with me offering to manage the case, and I have been barely coping with a stream of inwards emails of encouragement from experts in New Zealand, the US and UK.  

If I was a pessimist, I would give up this campaign for an acceptable microbiology service because progress has been virtually non-existent in 13 years.  

Every specimen from our area arrives on the Tauranga lab bench hours or days too late, and nobody with power seems to give a damn. The warning from Auckland Infectious diseases professor Mark Thomas about the risks from unceasing unwise prescription of antibiotics partly due to delayed identification of the dangerous bugs will never be tackled; bugger the ever-increasing risks to patients.

I am encouraged by the support of our scientist/Dr Mayor Victor Luca and others in our community who send me leads on activities elsewhere.  

I am not discouraged by the inaction of most of our family doctors who let the for-profit labs in here from 1988 onwards. But several GPs did support us when Tauranga took over our lab in 2011. Sadly, they are all dead or otherwise gone (left the Eastern Bay).

I hope that our public hospital doctors wake up someday soon. Ten years ago, their predecessors asked me to help them lead a campaign opposing the Tauranga takeover.

There’s still time to reverse this centralisation and I make a plea for leaders in our communities to step up, as did Kawerau magnificently with the Hepatitis B campaign. The current battle is more urgent.

I miss the trust in me and support of people such as the late Sir Michael Cullen, who copied me a 2018 email to a senior official in parliament after I sought his help. Former Minister of Health Annette King (now our ambassador in Australia), copied me her Beacon letter of strong support in 2013, and I have had occasional encouragement since then. However, the profit-lab takeover of our public hospital labs came in two waves, one under Labour and the other under National, so I have lost faith in both.  

I have sought help from Mr Peters because of his prompt actions following a briefing I gave him on the hepatitis B problem in our country. He steered millions of dollars to the Hepatitis Foundation at a critical time, and we succeeded in our goals.  

Mr Peters quickly grasped my message re lab downgrades during our meeting on September 20. His staff will do all they can to support him and us.

This microbiology lab services battle is more serious than was Hep B. If our doctors of medicine shared his concerns for Eastern Bay patients, I would not need to write letters like this.