Hidden Agendas For West Coast Secondary Services?

9.2.09
Hidden Agendas For West Coast Secondary Services?

Democrats for Social Credit Health Spokesman David Tranter is pointing to the centralisation of health services under the corporatisation of management over the past two decades as warning that there are almost certainly hidden agendas behind recent questions over the future of West Coast secondary services.

Even the very short-term assurances by Greymouth management that service closures, "are not likely to be done this financial year" (Greymouth Star, 7 February) should be stacked up against previous promises to rural communities such as that made by the health authorities shortly before Oamaru lost its surgery - and subsequently their entire hospital - in the mid-90s. Yet just a few months before that happened the SRHA (Southern Regional Health Authority) promised the North Otago community that they would keep surgery.

The duplicity of the political and bureaucratic agendas surrounding rural health services is shown by the fact that well before the closure of both Oamaru and Balclutha Hospitals a leaked SRHA strategic plan listed Balclutha and Oamaru to be "substantially reduced". Significantly for the Coast, that list also included Greymouth. "Given that similar agendas have been carried out all around rural New Zealand during recent decades when most of the scores of hospital closures have been rural ones, the West Coast public should treat any assurances with deep suspicion", Mr. Tranter said. "Trusting political and bureacratic promises is a proven recipe for losing services because when the decisions are made there is no genuine consultation and by the time the public realises they have been taken for a ride it is too late".

"There is a further clear warning for the Coast in that at the last planning session in 2008 the board chairman, Rex Williams, stated his view that we should end secondary services here, this being in relation to trying to reduce the budget deficit", Mr. Tranter said. "Given the power of DHB board chairs throughout the country, such a view has to be taken seriously as a distinct possibility of what is to happen on the Coast. Indeed, given rural New Zealand's experience over recent decades West Coasters would be justified in suspecting that such comment is an indicator of an agenda already decided by the Ministry of Health".

The Friends of West Coast Hospital Services are right to condemn the function of DHB boards New Zealand-wide. Given that even their elected members are responsible solely to the Minister of Health and not to the public who elected them, and given that they are impotent to challenge the dictates of the Ministry of Health they are still, in former Canterbury DHB board member Philip Bagshaw's words in 2004, "dysfunctional and undemocratic".

ENDS

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