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The Detail: Is NZ's Health Leadership In Crisis?
Sharon Brettkelly, for The Detail
The health portfolio is bigger and more complex than fixing potholes, and it's unlikely Simeon Brown can turn that ship around this parliamentary term.
Margie Apa, Nicholas Jones, Diana Sarfati, the board of Health New Zealand... and will Lester Levy be next?
The biggest names in our health service are tumbling like dominoes.
It has been called a bloodbath and a crisis. What's going on?
Every day there is a new story about shortages - patients having to wait for scans, to see a GP, in the emergency department; whole towns seeing their specialists disappear; near misses because there's no one left at the hospital to help. Back office staff being culled, resulting in doctors having to do what they do worst - the paperwork.
The string of resignations of those trying to manage the issues just gets longer.
Newsroom's Marc Daalder has been covering the politics behind it.
"The opposition line is that these resignations are not necessarily people just deciding it's time to move on - you know they've hit that point in their career - that these are people being kind of pushed out by the government. The government is trying to foist the blame for failures in the health system on these public servants, and as Peeni Henare, the acting health spokesperson for Labour, said after the resignation of the Director-General of Health last week, it's "as if Christopher Luxon is getting rid of everyone who disagrees with him" but is fast running out of other people to blame for his government's failures.
"There's a sense that the political optics of this is, we need new leadership in the health system to deliver better; the people that were picked under Labour weren't getting it done; but maybe there is a question as to whether that really is the problem."
Exactly what their reasons are for going aren't 100 percent clear because they aren't talking, says Daalder.
And the question is, who's next?
Daalder says when he asked the new health minister Simeon Brown if he had confidence in the new Health Commissioner (who replaced the board when it was sacked) he was "very non-committal. He wouldn't say he did when I asked him a few times ... all he would say is 'there are challenges, and I'm happy to work with whoever is in that role'.
"In Parliament the next day Labour pushed Simeon Brown on this, again and again, do you have confidence in him and finally he said 'yes I do have confidence in him' but the fact that it took so much prompting makes you think that confidence can't be very strong and there is a sense I think in the health system that the new minister blames the commissioner for some of what's gone wrong since he's come into office."
Daalder tells The Detail that the new minister has a different focus to that of his predecessor, Dr Shane Reti, who was concentrating on financial issues at Health New Zealand, which was overspending by $130 million a month. Brown has been talking about GP shortages, wait times at emergency departments, and patients.
"There's a sense that maybe the government's caught up to the political realities facing it in the health system and that maybe people don't really care if Health New Zealand is running a deficit, what they really care about is if they're getting their care on time and at high quality."
But he points out that health is a much bigger deal, and way more complex, than the job of fixing potholes that was Brown's last task as transport minister.
"It takes more than fixing some potholes to right the ship that is the health system... part of the difficulty for the government politically is actually, there's nothing you can do in a month, or half a year, or a year - in a single parliamentary term really - to drastically shift the experience of the health system the way it meets patients, the size of the workforce... all of these problems that they're facing.
"You don't want to accidentally break it and make things worse, right, so you have to tread carefully."
Resident Doctor's Association national secretary Dr Deborah Powell says the three very top level resignations in a short time is a sign of the level of stress and difficulty our health sector is in.
"We are in real trouble. And our leadership and the destabilisation that these resignations are showing, is just a demonstration of just how much trouble health is in.
"And it really doesn't matter how many ministers we get, or CEs, or even director-generals, it's not going to solve our fundamental problem that health is strapped for cash. It's underfunded, exacerbated at the moment by a focus on funding and cutting costs, which is making things worse."
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