We also want to be sure that more holistic mental health services have adequate access to funding. Counselling and other forms of therapy, for example, have long been the poor cousin of pill-based mental health because of the dominance of the medical model. Another concern is the absence of monitoring and accountability mechanisms set out in the new legislation. We want to see monitoring and accountability provisions included in the bill. And we want a lot more thought on how to create genuine and effective monitoring and accountability at a community and national level.
Intangibles matter a great deal in health.
The last ten years have seen a massive decline in, for example, the amount of time nurses are able to spend talking with patients, as the focus has gone on more measurable aspects of the health system. We need to be able to show that these reforms will improve the quality of health care. We have concerns at a technical level as well. These include the uncertainty caused by annual funding rounds, the exact nature of any population based funding, and the way providers who deal with more than one DHB will be treated. We also wonder, for example, whether Health Funding Authority information will be passed to DHBs or end up buried in the bowels of the Health Ministry.