Reti +Levy: Having Burned Down a Forest, they want praise for replanting a single tree.

Yesterday's announcement and press release charitably described as "a drop in the bucket"

I got a text from a friend that Lester Levy, the Czar of New Zealand healthcare, was unexpectedly seen at Whangarei Hospital yesterday. Wow. The text was accompanied by an emoji of a little green man puking.

How keen I would have been to talk with him. It seems that none of the doctors and nurses who were working in the ED that day got to talk with him. I believe he was just making an appearance there with management.

I later heard that he and Shane Reti had used Whangarei to issue the proclamation that $42 million in additional funding was going to be spent on hiring doctor and nursing staff. Any attempts to correct the understaffing is a good thing, so I had to be grateful for that. But as I learned about some of the details, it gave me pause.

Please read carefully, because even I can’t quite get my head around this.

I thought the money was an additional $42 million. It’s not. It is repurposed from something else. They have merely shifted the money. Was that the money that they’ve taken away from support services, from IT, from the telephonists, from the HCAs? The money that they’ve pretended is “back office” spending, when really they’re cutting the services that keep the hospital running: through attrition, hundreds of redundancies (what a loss of experienced people!), and all the unfilled shifts and empty roles that are not allowed to be advertised, in patient-essential positions like medical records and patient reception? Robbing Peter to pay Paul. If Peter was a receptionist, and Paul was a landlord who got $2.9 billion in taxpayer money for tax deductions.

I thought the money sounded like a lot: $42 million. 20 mill for doctors, 10 mill for nurses, and 12 mill for “minor improvements to hospitals” like microwaves or childrens toys.

Would it fix out crushing health understaffing problem? Not exactly. It would fix an estimated 3% of our doctor understaffing problem, and 3.5% of our nurse understaffing problem, and 0.25% of our health infrastructure problem. #ASMS described it as “a drop in the bucket”. You could also describe it as “pissin’ in the wind”.

What is the plan, the vision, for filling the other 97% of staff shortages that remain? More austerity, and deeper cuts. About $1.4 billion more in cuts to a Health NZ budget that the Commissar Levy says doesn’t need the money.

It’s insane. Giving with one hand, and taking away with the other. Like an arsonist that burns down a forest, but comes back the next day to replant a single tree.

-continued tomorrow-

-Gary Payinda

*as always, speaking in my private capacity as an individual and a doctor*