Patients dying in waiting rooms, leaking wards, understaffing, and a minister with few answers. Our health system is crisis, writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.
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A man in his mid-fifties presented to Waikato Hospital’s emergency department at 3.40pm on Monday. Nine hours later, he collapsed in a toilet cubicle and died. Zanae Kahu King had spoken to the man shortly before. She had watched him asking staff for pain relief earlier in the night. “He was asking for help,” she told the NZ Herald’s Michael Morrah. “He was complaining about how he’d been waiting for such a long time.”
King alerted security; around 20 staff came running. A video timestamped 1.13am, seen but not published by the Herald, reportedly shows a nurse performing chest compressions on the man as he is wheeled through the packed waiting room on a gurney, colleagues holding up a white sheet around him. Resuscitation was unsuccessful.
Patch-up jobs and concealed figures
The waiting room that night held 30–40 patients, more than there were seats for. Samantha Browne, who arrived at 4.30pm with abdominal pain and did not leave until 4am, told RNZ’s Kate Green there was a line out the door when she arrived and no room to sit. One man told her he had been waiting 14 hours. A nurse went around the waiting room at the end of her shift handing out complaint forms, urging patients to document their experiences in hopes of getting more resources.
New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) president Anne Daniels told the Herald the ED was “dangerously understaffed” and called the government’s responses “patch-up jobs”. NZNO chief executive Paul Goulter went further, telling RNZ that Health NZ “conceals the figures around how many staff are actually needed, and they staff up to budget” – making independent scrutiny impossible. He called for an independent inquiry, saying the coroner’s process was too slow. “This has to be addressed straight away, and the best place to address it is by going to someone who’s independent.” A hospital source told the Herald the death was made public because they feared “more lives will be lost” unless pressure was put on Health NZ.
Health minister Simeon Brown said the Waikato death was a “terrible situation” and ordered a rapid clinical review, but refused to say whether he could guarantee it would not happen again. OIA data obtained by the Herald shows ED staff nationally increased by 294 between September 2024 and December 2025 – but some individual districts saw frontline nurse and senior medical officer numbers fall, a detail Brown declined to address directly.
And the buildings are falling apart too
The Waikato death came in the same week that the physical state of New Zealand’s hospital infrastructure made headlines on two occasions. At Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland, photos obtained by the Herald’s Rachel Maher show debris scattered across the floor and water pooling inside the maternity ward. A source close to the hospital told the Herald the leaks happened every time it rained. Health NZ said three roof tiles had been replaced after the leak was discovered.
The building has a long history of structural concern: engineers found in 2019 it met only 20% of the current earthquake standard, making seismic upgrades prohibitively expensive, and it is earmarked for eventual replacement. Middlemore’s troubles are chronic – in April, a large rat was filmed in the hospital waiting room, and the building’s wider leaky building remediation programme, which began in 2010, is now forecast to cost almost $100m.
At Hutt Hospital, nurses told RNZ’s Bill Hickam about collapsing ceiling panels, electrical sockets crackling with water, soaking carpets and peeling wallpaper. “During periods of heavy rain, our focus shifts beyond patient care to identifying new leaks, reporting hazards, monitoring affected areas and ensuring clinical spaces remain safe while continuing to provide care,” one nurse delegate told RNZ.
Health NZ chief financial officer Bevan McKenzie told Newstalk ZB that $10m had been earmarked for weather tightness improvements in 2026/27, but could not give a firm remediation timeline until building condition assessments were complete.
