Labour is hiding from accountability with no more health data to be released until after the election, National’s Health spokesperson Dr Shane Reti says.

“The health sector is clearly in crisis – over several weeks there have been reports on Oamaru emergency department closing its door on patients, a 24-hour afterhour surgery in one of our largest cities being forced to close overnight and ambulance rampings, where an ambulance essentially becomes a waiting room, at one of our biggest hospitals.

“Instead of action, Labour is burying its head in the sand.

“Now it has also been confirmed that there will be no more health performance data released before the election in October.

“Is the latest data so bad that Labour don’t want to risk campaigning on running the health sector to the ground?

“I have seen how the sector is coping across the country with my own eyes, and in that time I was in an ambulance that was ramped, I saw rural afterhours clinics closed when they should have been opened and a sector struggling to keep up with the demand while battling staff shortages.

“National backs our health workforce, that’s why we’ve announced policy on increasing doctor numbers by 220 each year, building a third medical school, bonding newly graduate nurses and midwives for up to five years in return of paying off their student loan, and opening up our immigration settings to be competitive with the rest of the world.

“For six years Labour has failed our health sector. Instead of boosting up the frontline it pushed through a half billion dollar bureaucratic health restructure in the middle of a pandemic, distracting the sector and taking attention and resources away from the frontline.

“A National government will deliver better health outcomes for all New Zealanders by setting clear health targets that we hold ourselves publicly accountable – unlike Labour who cannot be honest with New Zealanders before an election.”

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