A Labour MP has been warned her comments could be defamatory, explains Stewart Sowman-Lund for The Bulletin.
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‘Tell that to the nurses’
Parliament’s “scrutiny week” has maintained its high drama level, with a tense six-hour grilling yesterday of Health NZ’s commissioner Lester Levy. As Stuff’s Bridie Witton reported, Levy’s claim that there had been “no cuts” to the health system attracted mocking remarks from opposition MPs, with Labour’s Ingrid Leary saying: “tell that to the nurses, tell the national public health service”. Levy responded: “I think there’s a line being drawn between reducing staff and a cut”. Newsroom Pro’s Jonathan Milne reported yesterday (paywalled) that Levy had backed down after attempting to retrospectively include $135 million of anticipated redundancies in the 2023/24 finances, even though the staff wouldn’t actually be laid off until now, the following financial year. It’s been reported that the auditor-general intervened and made changes to Health NZ’s draft financial statements.
Cooking the books?
Labour’s Ayesha Verrall accused Levy of “cooking the books” to make the deficit look worse in order to justify cuts to the health system. Levy said he resented that remark and asked for an apology. “The books are not good. There’s serious under-performance, financial performance,” Levy acknowledged. 1News’ Benedict Collins reported Levy as saying the comments by Verrall “could be considered to be defamatory”, though the MP has stood by her remark. “I think the envelope is being pushed here on what legitimate treatment of the accounts are,” Verrall said.
The true state of Health NZ’s books was revealed on Tuesday with a $722 million deficit for 2023-24. Chief executive Margie Apa, speaking to Morning Report, said the forecast deficit for the current financial year was $1.1 billion dollars – lower than the feared $1.7bn previously announced but still a sizeable hole. The health boss confirmed the bulk of its deficit was down to funding nursing staff. “We have a $797 million in personnel costs that are greater than budget. Now not all of that is nursing, we did recruit more in other areas as well,” she said. As a result, Health NZ has extended its cost-cutting drive by another year through until 2027 when it hopes to reach surplus.
The battle for beds
During the lengthy session, Levy did promise to reveal how he intended to reset the public health system, but wouldn’t put a timeframe on it, reported The Post’s Rachel Thomas. He expected the health agency to make a serious “dent” in waiting room times within two years. That will be a challenge. In the Herald today, Michael Morrah speaks with an emergency physician at Auckland Hospital who claims the lack of beds for patients is the worst it has ever been. “We know that there is potential preventable mortality if we get flow through our hospital system better,” said Peter Jones. The government wants to have 95% of patients either admitted to a ward, discharged, or transferred to another hospital within six hours of arriving at an emergency room. Jones said getting to 80% would be the “inflection point” – but that right now we are “nowhere near” meeting that.
‘Genuine stress’
As if enough attention wasn’t already on health sector, thousands of nurses also walked off the job in protest over pay and staffing issues earlier in the week. The Post has a good overview of the issues raised by those participating in the strike – everything from wards being overrun, a lack of free parking and cutbacks on food for patients. In an interview with the Pacific Media Network, former Te Whatu Ora chair Rob Campbell said there was “genuine distress” among healthcare professionals at the moment. “I know that the Pacific teams are all being restructured, yet again,” said Campbell. “They’ve had several goes at them, both in the head office and on the ground and so the wrong people are facing the stress and the difficulty of this.”