Philippa Branthwaite

While we wait  and wait for the obstetric and gynaecological  services to be returned to Whakatāne, for the pressure on our Emergency Department to ease, and for newly graduated  nurses to get jobs in New Zealand rather than move to Australia to get their first jobs, the National/NZ First/ Act government has come up with a new solution. They are outsourcing non urgent surgery to the private sector.  Non urgent or so-called elective surgery is different from acute or urgent surgery.

While many governments have contracted out non urgent surgery to the private sector in the past, this is normally  been to fill gaps while  resources are built up in the public sector. Now Simeon Browen is planning 10-year contracts with private hospitals to do “ high volume low acuity” operations leaving  all the acute, difficult, time and resource intensive operations to the public sector.

This comes at a high cost to the people of New Zealand.

1.         More expensive because the private hospitals have to make a profit. They also have to pay the doctors, nurses and other staff more to do the operations to attract them into the system.

2.         Less staff available to work in the public health system. Many of these doctors, nurses and other staff will also be working in the public sector. So who will be left to do the acute operations?

3.         More burnout in the public health system. In the public system there will be fewer people to do the job, and their work will be more complex and intensive, and this leads to staff burnout and then more vacancies. Staff will be incentivised to work in the private system because not only will they be paid more but the work will be less complex

4.         Undermining of the in-hospital training system we use to train doctors and support newly graduated nurses and other health professionals. Young doctors for instance start with non-acute work but if this work is not happening in the public sector, then our taxpayer dollars will follow this young doctor into the private system where we not only provide the private hospital with an in-training doctor but subsidise their wages.  This will impact on the training we provide for specialty areas in the future. Newly graduated nurses and others will also be employed with a taxpayer paid extra to support their first two years of work in the private system. Lucky old private system!

5.         Small-town hospitals like ours, and rural hospitals, will be downgraded as more and more non acute operations will be moved to centres with private hospitals. We already know of too many people having to drive to Tauranga for their health service, including women using obstetric and gynaecological services.

Christchurch Charity Hospital founder Philip Bagshaw said “Ten-year contracts will put us on a rapid road to a US-style health system that is prohibitively expensive, highly inefficient and unacceptably inequitable, and from which we will be unable to extricate ourselves.”

If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, moves like a duck- it’s a duck. Or it is privatisation - pure and simple! A future government will be tied to the 10-year contracts and making changes will be that much harder.  Act so called spokesperson for health said that Act could see “a future when the government is primarily a purchaser, not a provider, of health services.”  Looks like Simeon Brown is giving Act's  vision a big boost. That is the US model, not the New Zealand model.

And we know that privatisation only works for the investors, not the taxpayer or the consumer. And usually, it does not work at all. The BNZ had to be bailed out twice and is now in foreign ownership, Air NZ had to be bought back for $1.00 having been destroyed by private ownership, the electricity system is a mess, and we are facing ever increasing price increases without enough investment in the necessary infrastructure to prevent Auckland suffering blackouts

NZ First is silent about the privatisation of our health service, they are just worrying about gathering headlines about woke spiders, and Christopher Luxon has abdicated as usual.

Labour’s health spokesperson Dr Ayesha Verrall, said this shows the direction the Coalition government wants to take NZ health system and is not the answer.  Dr Ros Pochin, president of the RACS, said, “outsourcing of services is not a solution to an inadequately funded health system.”

I am with Ayesha and Ros! Fund the health system properly, build the infrastructure, do proper workforce planning and use evidence to make health decisions.