Health

the new centralised health system, similar to everything else Laboor has centralised does not seem to be travelling well
Shane Ret quoted in KiwiBlog
www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2023/04/the_health_merger_has_meant_less_transparency.html
HealthNZ is now apparently unable to report on staff vacancies in emergency departments, National’s Health spokesperson Dr Shane Reti says.
“New Zealand is facing a workforce shortage, and it is one of the most important issues facing the health sector right now. It is simply not credible that HealthNZ do not know how many emergency department staff vacancies there currently are.
“Late last year, the previous Health Minister was able to send a detailed breakdown of staff vacancies at every single emergency department. But recently HealthNZ through the current Health Minister effectively said they do not have the data.
“None of this makes sense. According to this Labour Government one of the key factors of creating the health restructure was to centralise data and decision making. After spending half a billion dollars, key data is suddenly nowhere to be found.
David Farrar comments
It is bizarre. The data should, in theory, now be able to be collated by one person, not 23 people. Yet under the old system we could find out this health data, and under this new expensive system, we can’t.

5000 New Zealand nurses
Nearly 5000 New Zealand nurses have registered to work in Australia since August. It shows the extent of those crossing - or planning to cross - the ditch, often to take up lucrative short-term contracts of up to NZ$8500 a week.6 days ago

Why wouldn't you go??

Its not about Health

Health Department's own number showing the major decline in seeing ED patients on a timely basis
www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2023/12/a_new_low_for_ed_waiting_times.html#comments
Te What Ora has finally published data for the Sep 23 quarter and the percentage of ED patients seen within six hours has dropped from 72.3% a year ago to 67.6%. Under national is was almost at 95%. So labour have managed to go from 1 in 20 waiting over six hours to more than six in 20.
More shocking is if you look at the absolute numbers. At the old level of 95% seen within six hours, that means only 17,000 ED patients would wait more than six hours. But the actual number in the latest quarter was over 110,000. That's 90,000 more NZers waiting more than six hours at ED.
Curse Labour for removing this as a national health target in 2017. It will now take a lot of time and effort to turn it around and get it back to acceptable levels.

Also note in the comments people talking about Outpatients being removed from waiting lists to see specialists and/or for surgeries, all to make the data look less worse better than it really was. One of the first actions by Labour in 2017 was to remove KPI's on many government departments with the inevitable decline in services.

This thread is probably as good as any for this.
Fluoridation.

Fungarei are spending $4mil on the mass medication following the now illegal directive from Bloomfield to do it.

One of the Councillors pushed a motion to pause the capital works for fluoridation till they find out if they actually have to do it. Sounds logical to me. There is another High Court hearing in Feb 2nd.

Council says it will cost $9mil to stop the work.
But that includes a $200k fine and $10k PER DAY fines from MOH. Accept the High Court has already found the MOH directive was illegal. So it's not actually the cost to suspend the works. That cost would be what they've already spent on planning and design, pre-ordered gear and possible costs to extract themselves from civil contracts. Council are effectively lying on the cost to stop the work.

From a practical point of view, if contractors are already on site mid-project, it is a bit of a pain to stop or cancel it. But if it's just the planning and design work thats been done, and a civil contract hasn't been started, then sure, park it.

I've never had a strong view on fluoridation. I'm now leaning against it following the jab mandates on the grounds of mass-medication. But what I find mind-boggling is the priorities of the MoH. Hospitals are imploding, Primary Care is fucked, they can't build a Hospital to save themselves (Dunedin, Whangarie, etc) and they are fucking around with these low importance projects that have no relevance to the health problems are are impacting our communities. But somehow it is fully funded. Imagine.

www.rnz.co.nz/news/ldr/505421/fluoride-fracas-flares-up-again-at-whangarei-district-council

several yrs (40) I was advised to have my wisdom teeth removed.todate no issue so 1 does wonder,is it a money making scheme?  The boys drunk juice all the young lives and on a recent dental check up told they have perfect teeth. No fillings 21/23

Whangarain is another name used by many at the moment.