Alexander (Sandy) Milne

I add to my concerns in Wednesday’s Beacon regarding the real threat of the loss of a full Obstetrics and Gynaecology (O&G) service for women in the entire Eastern Bay. I also offer advice as a former front-line veteran, to the groups that will now surely rally in support of our women.

I have had years of experience battling politicians, officials and profiteers, and know many of their tricks in the trade.

For a start, we should all take this seriously and assume it’s a plan. We must not let the powers-that-be downgrade our service, promising to re-instate it when specialists are available. Don’t believe a bar of that. When Tauranga takes over, we get relegated. Their win is our loss.  

We should, as a community, actively headhunt for replacement staff right now. Every local doctor of medicine should step up and assist, as paediatrician Chris Moyes has already done. We should offer inducements to interested specialists and include free or low-cost rental housing for a couple of years at least. Our council should divert ratepayer money from other schemes to help ensure that this campaign succeeds.

The following comments to me were by a former hospital specialist. They date from six years ago but are even more relevant today.

“Whakatāne Hospital clinical services are being bled to death slowly, by which I mean taking away bits and pieces from various departments for the Western Bay so that things will eventually fall over in Whakatane”.  

He focused on radiology and microbiology services and added this, “Honestly, I cannot see how this is going to attract senior medical staff when they find out there is no microbiology on-site and no radiologist on site two weekends out of for a month.”

I wonder how interested doctors will react when they hear that our key obstetrics and gynaecology service is on the point of being hijacked.

The good doctor continued: “My feeling is that Whakatāne Hospital is being slowly down-sized (downgraded) into a ‘stabilise and shift’ hospital and only low-risk procedures will be done here, ie, day stay stuff”.

I have a vast correspondence with doctors and health officials and supportive GPs, which I am happy to show well-wishers so they can see how individuals and communities and even doctors are manipulated, and I can describe tactics used to mislead the unwary. The drivers of these changes have privatise-and-centralise agendas and they go to great lengths to control the information stream. They are successful too often.

I offer free use of a comfortable 20-place board room plus advice for groups who need it.  

Women in communities like ours New Zealand-wide have had an increasingly raw deal in healthcare since the Americanisation of our health services intensified. The time to reverse that is long overdue. It is now urgent.

I call on doctors, teachers, nurses, council workers, unions and many other groups to step up and support our women and stop the rot.

We should all be leery about the agenda and promises made by our health bosses. Most of them do not deserve our trust.