Healthcare critic deserves awards
A title in a New Year Honours list is a traditional reward for public service of various kinds, often given near the end of fruitful lives, even as the specific names of titles come and go. The New Zealander of the Year award, launched in 2010 and sponsored by Kiwibank, is a very different kind of prize.
It is a populist contest, open to public nominations and judged by a panel rather than rubber-stamped by Government. While less prestigious in official terms, it is a useful guide to the Kiwi zeitgeist. Previous winners include Stephen Tindall, Richie McCaw, Lance O’Sullivan, Anne Salmond and Taika Waititi.
The 10 names on the shortlist for 2018 also offer a snapshot of our concerns and interests. There is a sportsman, three scientists, a mental health activist, a fashion designer, an equal pay advocate, two anti-violence campaigners and a surgeon. The gender balance is four men to six women.
It is for more than parochial reasons that we are pleased to see Canterbury Charity Hospital founder Philip Bagshaw on the list. The Christchurch surgeon is a figure who, and we say this with admiration, would be less comfortable on the official honours list.
Bagshaw has long been a trenchant critic of Government health policy and underfunding. The charity hospital was itself an act of criticism, created after a particularly tough period for public health in Christchurch.
Charity hospitals were common before universal healthcare. To see one reappear in the 21st century was an indictment of the direction taken by public health policy in the 1990s. On the positive side, Bagshaw has been overwhelmed by public support for the charity hospital, which is funded by donations and staffed by volunteers. The hospital has also been nominated in the community of the year category.
A survey of Bagshaw’s commentary about health over the past decade would show why he is perhaps more at home in an alternative honours list. There has been a consistent awareness of how underfunding has reduced health services.
In 2017 he co-authored an opinion piece that revealed that compared with other OECD countries, our spending on healthcare is low and falling as a proportion of gross domestic product. This was ‘‘an intentional policy move flagged by Treasury in a document in 2012’’.
In 2016, he talked of successive governments tightening purse strings and encouraging ‘‘health services to be quietly farmed out to private providers’’. He also made an overt connection to politics when he wrote that he wants his children and grandchildren ‘‘to live in a country where investment in healthcare for all is considered to be far more important than tax cuts for the rich’’.
In earlier comments, he warned that ‘‘we are drowning in a sea of spin’’ and the public health system was ‘‘top heavy with managers, squandering vast amounts of money on paper-shoving’’.
It hardly needs to be said that comments such as these will have not endeared Bagshaw to the health service’s managers and political masters, but his commonsense outspokenness is one of the reasons why he seems to have won over so much of the public.