Health activist Malcolm Mulholland was in Whakatāne, where he said at a public meeting we must act now to address our failing health system as it affects every one of us, writes Dave Stewart, of the Hikoi For Health Coalition

A small group of people turned up on Thursday night,April 5,  at Liberty Church to hear Malcolm Mulholland from Patient Voice Aotearoa.

Mr Mullholland is a Māori historian whose wife died of breast cancer after a struggle to get access to cancer drugs that initially were unfunded. He became an advocate for increasing funding to Pharmac (an underfunded public service organisation that, in many people’s opinion, has prevented Aotearoa being broken by the big pharmaceutical corporations).

He fought to increase Pharmac funding under multiple governments, and won. He’s taken his fight all over New Zealand media, and is now fighting an even bigger fight: trying to prevent the breakdown of public healthcare services in New Zealand.

After his wife died, he was then made aware that his 84-year-old father, a patient at Buller Hospital, was being transferred to Greymouth Hospital, an hour south, because they didn’t have enough staff to keep the hospital open on the weekend.

Buller is a new hospital, yet in its first 12 months of being opened it had been closed a total of one full month due to staff shortages.

The deterioration in services meant locals in Buller were ready to make a stand. On September 28, 2024, locals had a silent march in the Buller District town of Westport to oppose proposed cuts to regional health services. From this,they initiated a petition they called the Buller Declaration on Public Health.

The Buller Declaration on the State of the New Zealand health system consists of the following text:

As signatories to this declaration, we assert:

· Aotearoa New Zealand's health system is in a state of crisis.

· The Government must act urgently to address that crisis.

· Rural, Māori, and low-income populations are disproportionately impacted by the crisis.

· The Government must act urgently to meet its obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi and protect Māori health, in consultation with iwi and hapū.

· The Government must allocate additional resources to train, recruit and retain more nurses, doctors and specialists.[

Mr Mullholland has left a copy of the Buller Declaration with Whakatane Mayor, Dr Victor Luca, and it will be left in the library for people to sign. It’s important that we all sign this to make sure our voices are recorded as opposing the loss of a public health system and draw what Mr Mullholland calls ‘a line in the sand’.

“This is an important time in our history,” he said.

He said that after winning against the Government he was inundated with calls for help from all over the motu, hence he started the nationwide patient advocacy.

Mr Mullholland then went on to detail information he unearthed about the severe crises at Whakatāne Hospital that are going to cause serious problems very soon.

The affected departments are psychiatry, radiology and ED.

There should be 14 senior medical staff in ED, there are only 8.4. In psychiatry there is only one psychiatrist and there should be three. With the serious issues in our local community around mental health, this is completely unsatisfactory.

People react only when it affects them, but Mr Mullholland insists, we must act now because the failing public health system does affect every one of us.

He then introduced two Whakatāne based student nurses, Kereru Hicks and Jessica Matenga-Barnes. Both are in their third year approaching graduation and neither have any guarantee of getting a job in a health system short staffed in nurses.

Student nurses train because they want to be nurses. It’s expensive and they don’t get paid for placement – same as all other health students. That is completely unfair and counterproductive. It wouldn’t be like this is we saw education as an investment, not an expense.

The students invest huge amounts of money into themselves and want a return. Half of them end up going overseas to recoup that investment.

And while we have a nursing shortage, these students have no idea if they will even get a job when they qualify.

In our hospitals, nationwide, staffing shortages are such that to solve the problem, instead of investing in our own people we “import” high-priced short-term people from overseas, and this is the most expensive option. All the money that funds the most expensive solution comes from elsewhere. Hence the crisis.

Dr Victor Luca spoke of our two-tiered health system where 35 percent of us have private health insurance, and 65 percent rely on an underfunded public health system, and that’s the problem.

“New Zealand today has a housing crisis, an infrastructure crisis, an education crisis, a law and order crisis and a health crisis,” Dr Luca said before briefly going into what he has learned from his research into these crises.

“The situation we are in today, didn’t happen today. It didn’t happen last year, or the year before that, or the year before that.”

According to his research “It’s been ongoing for about 40 years”.

“We didn’t get where we are today by accident, it has been engineered, by neoliberal economics basically,” said Dr Luca.

“The idea that the market fixes everything; well, the market has failed in all the areas where we have crises in,” he said.

So, instead of investing in our people we have shovelled invest into an unproductive, and untaxed, housing bubble.

The conclusion, which means challenging neoliberalism, requires a mature and respectful debate about what kind of health system we want from our Government.

If we want to solve the problems in our community, we must understand the root cause and we will get nowhere unless we have some difficult conversations about investment.

But we simply must have those conversations.

There is a podcast of the Liberty Church Public Meeting available for download at https://shorturl.at/y7x51