No health-sector cuts needed
Because ditto.
Or, consequently, even greater difficulties retaining the staff we have trained on our shores, while specialists we would like to attract from overseas check around and decide that, gee, maybe ours isn’t a health system that appeals so much.
Health Ministry critical projects director Michael Hundleby says DHBS have shown they can reduce their deficits without cutting frontline services.
He says they have done this by looking at rationalising back-office functions, curtailing international travel, reducing layers of managers, better staff management and reducing waste.
Put it like that and, quite obviously, detonated budgets are a fine thing. Because, see, they lead to all these splendid outcomes. They are gentle motivations towards redoubled efforts and newfound efficiencies.
Even if what Hundleby describes is a fair summation of what the boards and their patients have been experiencing in recent years – and one or two people might quibble about that – the fact it’s happened so far hardly makes it safe to assume that further efficiency remains to be found to correct this latest round of eyewatering deficits.
Sector sources say the forecasts from the 20 DHBS are for a collective deficit of more than $160 million for the 2017-18 year, though the boards’ annual plans have yet to be confirmed.
No board has been deeper in deficit disodour in recent years than the Southern one, which, now under commissioner control rather than an elected board, has been improving its act in respect of that bottom line, and, to be fair, in some service delivery areas as well. Elsewhere, however, the services have been conspicuously failing us, just one example of which would be the much publicised and frankly abject failures in its urology service.
Overall Government spending on health has been increasing dramatically, and there’s the small matter of a $1.2 billion to $1.4b Dunedin Hospital rebuild ahead.
That’s no small thing. But if we’re to have a sense of scale then the unhappy reality is that as the population has grown and aged, the level of need has increased much more dramatically than the funding provided.