Funding boost welcomed
Southern District Health Board chief executive Chris Fleming has welcomed the news that the Government will make a record investment in district health boards in the next financial year.
Health minister David Clark and Finance minister Grant Robertson announced yesterday that $3.92 billion had been set aside during the next four years to improve the clinical services provided by health boards throughout New Zealand.
A once-off injection of $282.5 million would help health boards catch up on backlogs caused by the Covid-19 crisis, while $31.35m a year would help them manage planned services.
Details of exactly how the funding will be distributed have not yet been released.
The Southern DHB had historically carried one of the biggest deficits in the country.
The deficit to date shrunk by $578,000 to $3.9m in March, but Fleming noted that a raft of unknowns related to Covid-19 crisis meant this was a distorted number.
He said the true cost of the crisis could only be calculated once New Zealand moved out of alert level restrictions.
‘‘It is difficult to forecast the year-end result at this stage due to so many uncertainties,’’ Fleming said.
A portion of board funding typically comes from the Ministry of Health in the form of incentives for meeting ministry targets. Fleming had previously told the board these targets would not be met because of Covid-19 restrictions and raised concerns that the ministry had provided little guidance on how it would replace the lost income.
Southern DHB executive director of specialist services Patrick Ng told board members last week that about 1000 elective surgeries and 16,000 specialist appointments had been impacted by the crisis.
Clark said the cash injection was expected to cover 153,000 more surgeries and procedures, radiology scans and specialist appointments throughout the country.
Clark said Government had previously underinvested in health and the allocation in the 2020 budget was designed to ‘‘tackle the legacy of neglect’’.
‘‘As a Government we’ve put a significant amount into DHBs to put them back on the path to sustainability. This is a longterm plan, as rebuilding our health system will take sustained investment over a number of years,’’ he said.
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director Sarah Dalton called the funding a ‘‘welcome shot in the arm’’. ‘‘The effects of that underinvestment have been playing out in decaying buildings, worsening waiting lists and access to healthcare, along with staffing shortages and burnt out workforces,’’ Dalton said.
She said it would take more than one budget to lift the healthcare industry out of the hole it had been operating in.
Health boards would need to work on improving their financial performance, Clark said. The Southern DHB is revising its annual plan, due for completion in midJune.
A draft plan was submitted to the ministry before the Covid-19 crisis, but is now deemed ‘‘a work of fiction,’’ Fleming said, because priorities had changed dramatically since then. The new budget would include lessons learned during the crisis that could be used to streamline services and costs.