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Open mike 10/09/2024
49 comments on “Open mike 10/09/2024”
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Blimey, who could of seen this coming
Patient dies in ED waiting room at Rotorua Hospital https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/527510/patient-dies-in-ed-waiting-room-at-rotorua-hospital
It is important to remember lack of money is not the issue. It is a lack of will to invest in staff and improve wages. After all of landlords aren't complaining about their plight.
We could have been nurse training locals, with a $200 a week grant. All fees forgiven if they are in the workforce after three years.
But neo liberalism has our political masters worshipping at the altar of the balance sheet.
Totally this is about choice and they've chosen to manufacture a crises in health on top of entrenching the impacts of tobacco.
Keep them reeling appears the MO with voluntary redundancies being requested when insufficient resources are a current issue.
Theyre going for broke, literally.
I was involved in a serious car accident about a month ago, arrived at the hospital (Accident and Emergency) at 5.30pm by ambulance, accident occurred at 3.30pm, finally got a glass of orange juice with the breakfast at 9.00am the following morning. I was not even given a glass of water between 5.30pm and 9.00am, until the following morning. They were going to put me on fluids overnight however nothing happened, they were either too busy or communications were poor. I was a bit dazed from the accident so did not push the issue however not very professional IMHO. Got asked a million questions by numerous nurses and physicians but no follow through ???
It's been a mess for years. About 15 years ago I came down with what turned out to be appendicitis. In the waiting room for 2 hours before I practically collapsed on them, then trapped in ED for 22 hours because the hospital was on code red and didn't have a single bed anywhere. There were 16 patients also stuck there for lack of beds. For the duration, I was parked away very out of sight in a closet of a treatment room, because that's all there was.
I've ended up in ED a lot due to my chronic condition in the intervening years and spent plenty of time stuck on a trolley in the corridor. I'm absolutely terrified of needing EDs help again.
The code red/black which leaves hospitals completely gridlocked could be alleviated a lot by fixing the bed-blocking problem of people well enough to be discharged, but nowhere to go, so they have to keep them. Mostly the elderly. Better investment in age care (and not just for the rich) would be very cost-effective for the hospital system, and of great benefit to the general public.
It's like they need a convalescent ward, where people who aren't well enough to go home but are too well for hospital level care can go and be strengthened up.
In the olden days they used to have convalescent wards/homes associated with the hospitals. I went to one as a teenager after struggling with recovery after abdominal surgery.
But now you see it is much cheaper and therefore efficient (sarcasm) to skip the formal convalescence and send patients who would/should have been able to go to a convalescent ward/home back to their family. It is also much more 'efficient' to send patients home late on a Friday night when out of town family has had no notice and no chance to organise support.
Of course fiddling around with bed numbers is the stuff of modern hospitals. They shouldn't have to do it any more than schools should have rely on parental and community support eg cake stalls/sausage sizzles for the basics.
Health has been underfunded since forever – I worked there and I have written about this before.
Convalescent- that's the word I was trying to remember! I can remember when Kenepuru hospital had one of those, so more people could be discharged from Wellington Hospital. Bring back the Hospital Boards with the people who were able to be sensible about things.
Glad you got through that experience and came out OK, but it should not have happened like that – and it was 15 years ago.
The sad story continues. Stuff news report (10 Sept) says a patient waiting in Rotorua ED died before being seen.
George Monbiot in his recent book " The Invisible Doctrine." talking about the neoliberal approach to the NHS in the UK. "But funding cuts alone are a slow way to kill a service. You need accelerants and the most effective of themis the disempowerment frustration and elimination of the staff providing the service. Across the NHS doctors and nurses are leaving in droves as the pay is so poor. conditions so dangerous and the stress intolerable." Sound familiar? Different government. Same disaster capitalism.
Maybe they were deciding if you needed an operation and you were "nil by mouth" until that decision was made.
My experience with ED – and general hospital care, for that matter (for a range of different family members, with different degrees of emergency), is that you need to have a very persistent and effective patient advocate with you. I've been that person on many occasions. Remaining pleasant and polite (it's not the fault of the overworked staff), but also persistent in reminding them of outstanding issues, and missing communications.
Cleared by Doctors to be discharged at 9.30am Tuesday morning waited in Out Patients until 5.30pm until I got the fking paperwork, what a pack of useless cts IMHO. Obviously some serious under staffing issues, or poor systems or both. Great for the wealthy who can afford private health care with their huge Tax Cuts. Baldrick, Reti and the Sud African Levy need a good boot up the a**s.
While I fully appreciate that having the paperwork immediately can be necessary for some, depending on the scenario, it's way better for your mental (if not physical) health just to leave, and deal with the paperwork later.
That's a practical response to a less-than-ideal situation. Last month Dad was discharged from P.N. hospital after a 2-day stay for a dislocated shoulder – the care he received in the ED / operating theatre / Ortho ward was excellent.
The Ortho ward staff were flat out (it was midday on a Saturday), and gave him the option of waiting, or receiving the paperwork by post. A letter duly arrived six days later – might have been sooner but for the three-deliveries-a-week NZ Post service.
Three-days-a-week public hospitals anyone?
Does this comment mean that the approval rating is not better than labour's rating in 2023? If true then this COC Government has not inspired us.
And I thought Reti was a reasonable man but:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/health-minister-shane-reti-intervenes-to-scrap-hawkes-bay-health-policy-targeting-maori-and-pasifika/KFIDKUXIENFDBBGB35A26JY2KE/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
You dont get to sit at the cabinet table unless you've got the required qualities.
Todd played whistle blower and shane followed through.
National campaigned on providing healthcare on the basis of need not ethnicity
And just as National you frame it as a false binary and thus you’re propagating the lie.
Sounds fair to me. Why shouldn't someone in a similar financial position from another ethnicity not qualify for the same assistance?
What the abandoned policy was implying is that because someone is from a Maori or Pasfika background then they must be poor and in need of assistance.
If the policy focuses on need rather than race, then both Maori and Pasifika will get the lionshare of that assistance anyway if they are most highly represented in the group that needs help. And, others in a similar position won't miss out simply because they are of the wrong racial group to qualify.
Yip if we actually had a health system that functioned st a level that could cope with all new Zealand needs it would solve the problem of trying to play whakamole with different group needs
Do you prefer obstacles for all rather rather than removing obstacles for others?
I don't understand what you are saying. How does basing assistance on need create obstacles for people in need?
Race based assistance meets a need. Surely a thinking person would advocate for assistance for those who remain in need rather than creating more need by cutting assistance for those whose needs are being met.
But there are a lot of people in any given race who don't need assistance. Giving aid to those people creates inequity in itself.
Surely, shifting the aid away from those people and redistributing it to others in need who would otherwise miss out is a good thing? That means more people in need get aid not less, including those in the target race groups who are in need.
Someone really should do something about all them well browns getting assistance they don't need, eh
/
Don't dilute the medicine.
One at a time is good fishing. Solve one problem and move on to the next.
That is a nonsense thing to say. There are plenty of "brown" people now who are neither Maori or Pacific Islanders who would miss out under the abandoned policy.
Nothing to do with skin colour and insulting of you to suggest that.
There are plenty of successful Maori business people who likely don't need this sort of assistance.
Thus,focussing on those with need rather than race is a far more efficient use of money as it targets more accurately.
As was your intimation that somehow people who don't need it are receiving assistance.
And as the linked article says, regardless of ethnicity those who held a community services card, lived in the most deprived areas or were diagnosed with one of several long-term conditions such as diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease are included in the OurHealth Hawke’s Bay scheme.
So the next cab off the rank will be those who historically have been neglected by primary health care services and are most likely to present acutely at a secondary level; young Māori and Pasifika.
Which looks to me like sound public health policy.
Anyone who fits the new criteria should get assistance. Hence, there is no reason for needy Maori and PI in need to miss out on assistance.
If they don't meet the criteria, then they probably weren't needy in the first place.
Not many successful business people are under 24 – whatever their race.
Maori and Pacific people face barriers to accessing primary care. We know this because their rate of accessing primary care is very much lower than for non-Maori/non-Pacific. There is no reason to believe they have less health need than others – in fact it is likely they have more health need. Making it free is one way to remove a barrier to accessing care.
The alternative is for them to turn up at the hospital to access free treatment or because untreated simple conditions have become complicated. Hospital level care is very much more expensive then primary care.
I wouldn't want my surgeon to be tired – how about you?
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2024/09/10/guest-blog-ian-powell-surgeons-college-exposes-false-narrative-that-frontline-services-dont-depend-on-back-office-functions/
Reti, a reasonable man?? Sorry, one can't be reasonable and a National cabinet Minister. It's not part of the job description.
Being reasonable and fair are not prerequisites for NACTACTNZF MP’s IMHO.
Successive governments have been obsessed with "changing health systems".
Change the system – it will bring better outcomes for all of us – we are told.
Billions get spent on changing the system, but changing the system is largely a reshuffling of responsibilities in upper management. We had DHBs, then we didn't. One government even tried making patients pay to come in for treatment. All the reorganisation in the world has done little and cost lots.
It doesn't bring us what is really needed – more doctors, nurses, other health professionals, hospitals, clinics, equipment, etc and (despite what the CoC says) good administration people.
There is not enough support for young people to enter the medical profession. If a village in India can gather the hundreds of thousands of rupees to pay to train a man or woman to become a doctor who might one day work in NZ then why the f.. can't we do this in New Zealand for one of our own? We have the people, but obviously can't be bothered with the job of finding them and training them.
It is much easier just to look overseas for the ready-made people. Trouble is every other western country is doing the same so it becomes a kind of auction where the highest bidder wins, and that is not often New Zealand.
The NZ public health system, once said to be the envy of the western world (although that is arguable) has been let down by governments that have regarded it as a business, rather than a service. And poor planning! God knows, we were told two or more decades ago that with population dynamics – largely ageing and immigration – our health service needed to come up with plans how to cope with the changes but that hasn't happened.
Our population stands at over 5 million now, our health system is funded and staffed as if it were still 2-3 million. No wonder the cracks are becoming obvious. Things will not improve under the CoC, despite the political spin that comes from them daily. It increasingly seems that the CoC regard health spending as "wasteful spending" and perhaps it is better spent building billion dollar highways and by-passes.
One of the fundamental things we need to do with our public health services is stop running it like a business.
https://asms.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Creeping-Privatisation_final-Sept-2023.pdf
https://thenewpress.com/books/privatization-of-everything
https://weownit.org.uk/privatisation
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/22/the-guardian-view-on-privatisation-the-god-that-failed
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-want-to-privatise-everything
Baldrick and Reti should have a look at CUBA’s Health System they produce so many Doctors they export them around the World.
Both National & Labour allow mass immigration which cranks our Real Estate Market but do not build any new schools or hospitals and do not train additional new Doctors and Nurses to cater for the increased population. Dumb, Dumb and Dumber, personally, I can not see this improving under Baldrock, Seymour and Winnie???
To be fair every country in the world has the same problems.
Some of course a great deal worse.
NZ is ranked around 25th best in the world.
Guatemala is ranked 104 th.
But remember this is not Guatemala DR Ropata.
Not yet anyway
shane jones is working on it though, added and abetted by a penny pincher with out a soul.
Winston Peters went over the Minister of Finance's head to negotiate (demand) with Luxon that MFAT (his baby) would have only very minor cuts to staff compared with 6% cuts that other departments had to implement. Tail wagging the dog again. So unfair, wrong and shifty.
NZ Health System is stuffed in my IMHO, I thought it wasn’t bad 20 years ago when I had Cancer Treatment however successive Government both National and Labour have been running it into the Ground. TAX CUTS got this NACTACTNZF Government elected however what about health and education for us people in the Lower Socio Economic Groups????
There is an insidious form of privatisation happening in GP clinics. American interests are buying up clinics in N Z. The first thing they do is extract a “ management fee” which is non- taxed here and bank it in a tax haven, thus guaranteeing the clinic runs up a huge tax loss in subsequent years. This is the model that rest homes use and Winston railed about a few years ago but he has gone suspiciously quiet, maybe they found some loose change as a political donation. A few years ago an accountant acquaintance who had a few too many told me that a certain spectacles seller had a similar scheme whereby 38% of every dollar that went thru the door was repatriated to the Channel Islands, no wonder your prices can so low.
If I had any energy left I’d try to get into Parliament and stick it to these thieving bastards. This has to stop.
Happening in dental as well. Plus the dentists being pressured to meet targets for more profitable things.
Meanwhile the doctors and dentists get paid less.
'
Israel, Hamas' Biggest Recruiter
From Democracy Now!
@28:33 minutes:
Yes. Israel have always tortured their Palestinian prisoners. This includes rape. It is a well established fact that during the time of torture, the victim wishes that they were dead and given that many do indeed end up tortured and dead, it is quite obvious that many would choose to preempt the situation by being armed before the next contact with any Israeli defense or police or settlers. Armed Resistence increases your chance of avoiding more torture since if things go wrong, death is more likely than capture.
Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa want international criminal court to class environmental destruction as crime alongside genocide.
Good thinking.
"…have proposed a formal recognition by the court of the crime of ecocide, defined as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”.
“No countries have been willing to publicly say they oppose the adoption of ecocide as a crime, she said, but she expected resistance and heavy lobbying from high-polluting businesses, including oil companies whose executives could eventually be held liable if the offence were to be adopted.”
Agree+100%
Looks like some people very slowly realise how big a transformation is required to meet our climate targets:
NZ Herald – Auckland councillor calls for rethink on plan to halve car use and increase cycling 13-fold by 2030
Obviously, as long as Ford Ranger and Toyota Hilux are top-selling cars in NZ we won't achieve any of those reduction targets. So the short-term solution is to abandon any targets (see also the National Polluter Partner, ACT and NZ First in the Coalition of Destruction / Corruption) and hoping for a technical miracle in the meantime.
There will be some panic coming up between 2030 and 2050, when annual global temperature increase reaches the 2 degree mark already (maybe not permanently, but more and more frequently) and we have to reduce pollution not gradually but near instantly, like culling all cows at once and permanently mothball all those Ford Rangers and Toyota Hiluxes.