This 1 weird trick will help Simeon Brown dominate Health NZ

A super-hack more effective than testosterone and bleach injections combined.

From the NZ Herald: “Picking up the portfolio from Reti, Brown yesterday reinforced he would be squarely focused on achieving the Government’s five health targets announced in March:
90% of patients to receive cancer management within 31 days of the decision to treat.
95% of children to be fully immunised at 24 months of age.
95% of patients to be admitted, discharged or transferred from an emergency department within six hours.
95% of patients to wait less than four months for a first specialist appointment.
95% of patients to wait less than four months for elective treatment.”

Pretend for a second that you are Simeon, so you have no real-world Health experience, and zero specific Health knowledge. You got the job because you can say the right strong-sounding slogans, like “lets get rid of slow speed limits, they’re slowing New Zealand productivity down”. And laugh when public health experts tell you your speeding laws will kill kids.

You’re going to meet your KPIs to keep your ex-businessman boss impressed. When you fail, as you will, and begin losing National points on polls, you will be removed like Reti. Don’t worry, even if that happens, there will still be a University of Waikato Medical School for you to run someday, you could even be Vice-chancellor under Shane or get a $1 million consulting job like Joyce.

So, let’s analyse how you win this Health NZ challenge, as Health Minister #2:

90% of patients to receive cancer management within 31 days of the decision to treat.

Do more of what’s happening now: make sure patients get chemo or surgery within 31 days. Let all followup visits blow out from what they should be, weeks, to many, many months. Problem solved. If it’s worked for one year, it can work for two years.

95% of children to be fully immunised at 24 months of age.

Shift the goalposts: Let more people “opt-out” so that you don’t have to count them. NZ First’s strong appeals to anti-vax supporters can help with this. If they refuse the lifesaving jab, it’s their problem, not Simeon’s. Also, they won’t be counted against your target.

95% of patients to be admitted, discharged or transferred from an emergency department within six hours.

Easy one: Send people out quicker by doing less: encourage fewer CTs, fewer labs. You can actually remove staff so that lab services, and radiology/imaging, is harder to get. No one has to wait for an ultrasound, when there’s no afterhours sonographers employed. Do paper discharges, where they’re “discharged” ie, given discharge papers, but still in their bed. It used to work for admissions, now it can be used for discharges too.

95% of patients to wait less than four months for a first specialist appointment.

If you don’t worry about doing any second specialist appointments, this one is easy peasy. They get their first visit quickly, and then wait 6, 12, or 18 months for their susequent followup, or they eventually just give up and just see their GP for non-specialised advice in a pinch. It saves money.

Sure, people aren’t getting the care they’d expect, or the care Simeon’s and Mr Luzon’s families would get, but that’s life. Not everyone can be wealthy.

95% of patients to wait less than four months for elective treatment.

This is going to be harder. But if you make the public specialist jobs bad enough (through understaffing), you will have many more doctors working privately. You then funnel huge amounts of taxpayer money to these private hospitals, surgeons, and clinics. The marginalised patient will have trouble getting there, making appointments, and traveling.

Through simple attrition many people won’t make it to the private hospitals. That’s good, because private care is hella expensive: they have to deliver a 20% profit to their shareholders and hospital owners. That money can only come two ways: providing less healthcare, or providing cheaper healthcare. And always, always: understaffing.

If you do these 5 simple things, you can be a National minister with no qualifications, running an entire Nation’s national health care system on a whim. Easy.

Just whatever you do Simeon, keep up the insurance payments for a top-tier private health insurance plan for your own family, you will be fine. Goodness forbid they end up in the public system. It’ll be a shambles. Meeting all it’s targets and KPIs, but an absolute shambles for the suckers without top-tier private insurance.

-Dr Gary Payinda

Yes, this is satire. But yes, this is also exactly how currently and in the past, politicians and the executives they control have met KPIs and gamed the system. A target is only as good as the spirit behind it, and the spirit behind these changes are austerity policies meant to defund and destabilise essential public services, from Health to police to the Defence force, to public housing. This is a government that calls 3,000 missing nurses “overstaffing”; calls essential healthcare workers “back office staff” and fires 3,000 of their positions; calls a 5% decrease in real, per-capita operational Health NZ expenditures a “record increase in Health funding”.

So rest assured the coalition government will meet these 5 targets.

…unless patients and essential public service workers know about what’s happening, spread the news amongst themselves, and tell the government they’re onto them. At every possible opportunity. Call them out on it in the corridors, in the Beehive, in New World, in church, and on the street.

It’s going to be up to regular folks, especially patients, wage and salary workers, and independent reporters like BHN, the Kaka with Bernard Hickey, Paul Barlow, and documentarian Bryan Bruce to call out these deceptions whenever they’re attempted. Because the corporate media certainly won’t want to report it.