Goodhew Jo: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
Goodhew Jo: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Volume:647;Page:15971] 
JO GOODHEW (National—Aoraki) 
: 
 I am grateful for this opportunity to debate the performance and current operations of the Canterbury District Health Board in its most recent financial year. To put this in context the importance of this health board is that it is New Zealand’s largest it serves a wide geographical area and a large number of people and it employs some 8000—I am not mistaken—employees. So it is a very large provider—and funder as well. It is a very important district health board in the context of the South Island’s provision of health services. 
The audit report to the select committee noted two aspects of this district health board review where the grade for the district health board was “good”. Now “good” may sound OK but in fact “good” means that we recommend that improvements would be beneficial and that the entity addresses these. One aspect that I particularly want to make note of tonight is that our review of the board’s procurement policy indicated that although there are areas of strength it does not cover all the areas we would expect. Quite chillingly we recommend the inclusion of greater detail in a number of areas including fraud conflict of interest whole-of-life costs risk management and procurement planning and methods. Additionally recommendations for improvement being beneficial to the entity were also around financial information systems and controls. 
That was the gutsy audit side of things but in fact when we reviewed this district health board there was another picture. That particularly dry picture is not really the picture for the people of Canterbury—the people who rely on this district health board for health services. The picture that they have had over the period under review is what they often read in the headlines and see in the devastating photographs in the media. And what is that picture? It is a picture of repeated headlines about gridlock—the worst gridlock in the hospital’s history. It is a picture that is also about problems with the emergency department and of course they are both quite closely linked. The worst hospital gridlock is not only about patients but about staff. There may be 8000 staff but at the time that they were experiencing red gridlock there were 50 nursing vacancies. So serious was it that the district health board was trying to recruit some 60 British nurses to Christchurch. 
In fact the whole picture around New Zealand is very similar. We have 7700 foreign-born nurses working here and a matching 7500 New Zealand - born nurses living and working overseas. One nurse contacted the media and said that she and her colleagues were frightened for the services within Christchurch Hospital because she knew of times where the most senior nurse in charge on the ward was a bureau nurse—a qualified nurse yes but with no experience of the ward’s speciality be it surgical or in some cases coronary care. There are 1500 nursing graduates each year and about half of them are leaving to go overseas. 
Although the Minister of Health in this Parliament is telling us there is no crisis that is not quite the way staff see it. In fact Alan Pithie the Canterbury District Health Board chief of medicine for medical and surgical services said that this red gridlock is a crisis. This is exactly the symptom we have seen over and over again. This Government says there is no crisis. It does not listen to the doctors and nurses and it does not see them as part of the solution; it sees them just as part of the problem and we repeatedly hear about that. 
Hospital treatment figures were also in the headlines during the year under review. We found that when it came to triage levels happily this hospital is not one of the two that are not meeting the most serious triage levels—that is patients who need to be dealt with immediately. In fact it is meeting that target 100 percent. But when we come to triage level 2—that is patients who should be seen within 10 minutes—there is abject failure. Only 48 percent of those patients—and in March they numbered 2228—were seen so 1114 were not seen within the required time frame. If we go to triage level 3 we see the same happening again—only 49 percent were seen.