Hospital to face scrutiny
Southland Hospital has capacity issues that ‘‘need to be considered pretty soon’’, Health Minister Andrew Little has acknowledged.
Little said he had had a good look at the hospital during a visit to Invercargill yesterday, and could see that the emergency department was busy and constrained. The plan for expanding it had been modified – ‘‘which is why the required business case had to be kind of redone’’ – so he had undertaken to see where that was in the process.
But Little added that he had not been aware until his visit that the hospital was built on the basis of projections that showed Southland’s population declining over an extended period. In fact, the opposite had happened.
‘‘So I think there are issues about the capacity of the hospital in total that need to be considered pretty soon,’’ he said.
‘‘I don’t have any further information about what preparations there might be elsewhere in the hospital to better care for the local population.’’
He would be in contact with Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand’s infrastructure and investment arm ‘‘to see what planning, if any, they have for that’’.
Little also signalled that on top of the Government’s investment and reforms already under way, a big challenge lay ahead ‘‘for doctors, specialists and everybody’’ during the next few years to think about the way everyone did their job.
‘‘It won’t necessarily be the same if we’re going to meet all the demand for health care that population is putting on the system.’’
Health providers and local communities would need to be drawn together to think about not just what services were needed, but how they would be provided.
‘‘Who is best to do what for this patient at this time?
‘‘And the way we might traditionally have answered that question probably won’t be the same as we will answer it in 10,
possibly even five years’ time.’’
New Zealand wanted more GPs, but also for them to be focusing on what they did best, Little said.
As well as investing in more nurse practitioners ‘‘we want them working at the top of scope. They can do some prescribing. They can do a lot of health care’’.
A lot more could probably be done within the scope of practice nurses as well, he said.
‘‘For specialists in hospitals, we need them to be buddying up with other specialists as well as nurse practitioners and nurses, to redistribute some of the work to get more patient care out of what we’ve got.’’
Asked if these conversations had not been already happening, and for a long time, Little said: ‘‘My observation is we’ve never done health workforce development very well.’’
There had been a lot of consultation about what services were wanted, and how many GPs, he said. ‘‘But we haven’t talked a lot within the health professions about how do they best do their job, with what they’ve got.’’