Yesterday, Tony Ryall announced he is tinkering with his narrow and simplistic health targets. The changes in of themselves are positive but the targets are flawed. Even the Medical Association thinks so.
Association chairman Paul Ockelford said the health targets were commendable, but the emphasis on targets was flawed.
The targets needed to work alongside other approaches, such as housing and education, that influenced people’s health.
“If these are not addressed we will continue to have glaring health disparities in our communities and a high prevalence of preventable diseases that affect not only quality of life, but life expectancy,” Dr Ockelford said.
The targets were “narrow and simplistic”.
“They do not give a full picture of how our health system is performing because of the difficulty of linking these targets to information about patient and public health outcomes.”
The real challenges for our health system are the projected increasing cost of delivering healthcare and the increasing prevalence of preventable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease as well as depression and anxiety disorders.
Tackling both of these requires that a much greater emphasis be placed on keeping people well and preventing the need for costly treatments. This is desperately lacking in National’ approach to health.
To me, two of the most glaring omissions from National’s priorities are mental health and chronic disease management. The lack of resources to respond to people with low acuity need in these areas means they end up with much bigger problems than necessary and the taxpayer foots a much bigger bill than we ought.
Tony Ryall will enthusiastically point to short term output data that my look impressive now, but what is his strategy doing to improve long term health outcomes for our nation?
I guess we will end up like when Jenny Shipley was minister of health and turned down the routine screening for Hepatitis C for cost reasons. Saving a tiny sum but resulting in premature death and or a lifetime of suffering for those who needed blood transfusions.
The cost in the end was far higher than that Shipley was trying to save and because of the time factor she escaped responsibility for causing the early deaths.
Disability has also been ignored (similar but different to chronic health conditions and sometimes overlapping with mental health).
Yeah, its the good public health and education inputs and results that prevent the lack of (behavioural) self-respect that ends up in diabetes and heart problems.
That’s awful Ghost
Hilary,
Good points. Access to govt-funded rheumatology services, for instance, remains very poor – time to appointment is still usually several months despite patients often being in significant to severe uncontrolled pain.
Disability services are also pretty crap, a legacy of decades of governments, including Labour for NINE YEARS, addressing squeaky wheels rather than assessing need across the community as a whole.
Addressing these as well would be good, hope the government looks at it.