What Drives Improved Health Outcomes?

Monday, 26 September 2022, 7:14 pm
Opinion: Ian Powell

What is the biggest potential driver of improved health outcomes? Is it our public hospitals? Is it what happens in primary care which, in Aotearoa New Zealand, is largely provided by general practitioners? Or is it something else?

There are also some who believe that health restructuring improves health outcomes while forgetting that function and cultural change trump form and structural change respectively any day of the week. Unfortunately, these fantasisers put the health system at risk when they hold influential positions in it.

These delusional people largely reside with the Minister of Health and in his office, within the Prime Minister’s department, in some senior levels of the new Te Whatu Ora (Health New Zealand), and among business consultants who, needless to say, are the biggest financial beneficiaries.

Such is the fraudulent reality of this misplaced belief in restructuring that it deserves no further substantive comment in this blog.

Hospitals and primary care

Public hospitals do improve health outcomes for many but their role is to try to fix what the rest of the health system can’t. Patients generally come to hospitals because they are emergency cases, they have chronic illnesses requiring continual treatment, or are referred by general practitioners for either acute or planned treatment.

GPs and other primary care providers are invaluable ‘clinical gatekeepers’ for hospital access. The Labour-led government of Helen Clark believed that if more people accessed primary care, the pressure on hospitals would reduce.

This was true to an extent. Through the district  health boards established by her government, GP consultations increased by over a million. In a population then under five million, this was impressive. Certainly, for many of those additional patients who accessed primary healthcare, this intervention meant that they did not end up in hospital with more serious illnesses. Its preventative role was big.

But there is another side to this particular coin. These increased consultations also identified more serious unmet need that did require hospital admission. In other words, Clark’s government was ‘too successful’.

In improving access to primary care, not only did this improve many patients’ quality of life, it also unintentionally increased hospital admissions.  

Both hospital and primary healthcare have their limitations as drivers of improved health outcomes for New Zealanders. The biggest drivers of poor health are external to the health system which has no control over them.

These external drivers are called social determinants of health. Controlling these determinants depends on government legislated and policy decisions.

Smoking as a driver of poor health: Helen and Hone

The most significant social determinant of health is low income with poor housing among its fellow travellers. On 23 August, BusinessDesk published my article on another fellow traveller – smoking: The grocery product that kills when used as intended.

About 5,000 New Zealanders die each year because of smoking or being exposed to second-hand smoke. Annual cancer deaths in New Zealand are about 9,000; one in four of these deaths is due to tobacco.

But it is not just avoidable mortality.  Thousands suffer from permanent damage to their lungs or heart and untreatable blindness; all of which is also avoidable.

When health minister in the latter years of the third Labour government (1984-90), Helen Clark gave a significant boost to New Zealand’s declining smoking rates through her steps to combat tobacco company sponsorships, including big sporting events.

These decisions were profound for the time.  Despite bitter opposition from vested interests, her efforts gave anti-smoking campaigns much traction.

Then, in 2011,  Māori Party MP Hone Harawira, the Māori Affairs select committee chair, successfully recommended the adoption the National-led government of a smokefree goal of less than 5% of New Zealanders being smokers by 2025.

Along came Ayesha

In December 2021, under the Labour government, the Smokefree Aotearoa 2025 Action Plan was launched. Now Associate Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall has introduced into Parliament the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill.

As a medical specialist (infectious diseases) Dr Verrall brings immense expertise to the health portfolio. This is a huge plus for the health system, patients and health professionals.

The Bill’s measures include reducing the number of retail outlets that can sell tobacco and setting limits on nicotine levels and other ingredients.

The most powerful and striking measure, however, is amending the age limits for sale of smoked tobacco products by prohibiting their sale to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009.

In other words, endeavour to have a ‘smokefree generation’ policy by preventing young people, and the generations that follow them, from ever taking up smoking in the first place.

The impact of this especially and the other measures will be huge including increasing the life expectancy of those with much higher smoking rates, such as Māori women.  There will be a loss in tax revenue from tobacco.

But this revenue loss will be offset by reduced healthcare costs as we see both lung and heart disease decline. Tax revenue should also increase with more people becoming able to work.

What Helen Clark, Hone Harawira and now Ayesha Verrall demonstrate is that government legislation and policies which address the external determinants of poor health can become the biggest driver of improved health outcomes. If this was applied to addressing low incomes, then improvement would be even greater.

Finally, let me quote from my concluding comment in BusinessDesk:

Verrall’s legislative initiatives will do infinitely more for the wellbeing of New Zealanders and the health system’s sustainability than her senior health minister’s obsession with distracting restructuring to drive improvements in the system.

© Scoop Media

Ian Powell

Otaihanga Second Opinion is a regular health systems blog in New Zealand.

Ian Powell is the editor of the health systems blog 'Otaihanga Second Opinion.' He is also a columnist for New Zealand Doctor, occasional columnist for the Sunday Star Times, and contributor to the Victoria University hosted Democracy Project. For over 30 years , until December 2019, he was the Executive Director of Salaried Medical Salaried Medical Specialists, the union representing senior doctors and dentists in New Zealand.

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