A devastating and factual front-page article on the Health NZ crisis. So what, though?

Knowing there's a problem, and fixing it, are two different things.

I trust that there’s not one person out there still drinking the Kool-aid and believing that Reti’s, Levy’s, Luxon’s and now Simeon’s devastating austerity hasn’t affected patients.

You can’t eliminate 25% of public health positions or 50% of IT positions, or have understaffing of nurses by literally thousands, or leave doctor positions unfilled, or underfund primary care, and not end up with patient care problems that result in preventable deaths.

Political hot air and medical reality are two different things.

But congratulations to @NZHerald’s Knox and Morrah investigative journalists for looking into ED overcrowding, and reporting back with a bleak picture.

We know that international ED overcrowding studies have shown overcrowding and “access block'/bed block” (a confusing name for simply not enough nurses and hospital beds) killed roughly 1 in 83 patients who get marooned in ED longer than 8 hours.

We’ve also known for a while, that your risk of death in a New Zealand ED goes up by 10% if 10% of the ED beds are occupied by blocked by patients that need to be admitted, but have no open beds to get admitted to. It’s horrible for those patients, and for all the patients stuck in the waiting room queued behind them. Bad, delayed care in the ED has a death toll.

It also has impacts on the nurses, docs, and other staff, who know they’re providing substandard and unsafe care with painful and dangerous delays due to understaffing.

Speaking from experience, it’s beyond stressful to manage as many patients as you can in the ED and also have additional patients that you’re piling up in the waiting room, without adequate nursing staff to take good care of either group. Ordering tests on patients you haven’t been able to see, requesting important medications to be given when there’s no nurses actually available to give them. It’s not nice. It would be acceptable in a developing country. But not in a country littered with private hospitals, private clinics, private imaging centres and same-day surgical centres…all diverting taxpayer funding from the public sector. And not in a country seemingly so rich if can afford to let the wealthy make capital gains tax-free.

PM Luxon wouldn’t want this sort of substandard care for his mum.