Stewart Barbara: General Debate 
Stewart Barbara: General Debate 
[Volume:638;Page:8418] 
BARBARA STEWART (NZ First) 
: 
 What a debacle we have witnessed over the past few weeks as the Auckland laboratories’ testing shambles has unravelled bit by bit and ever so thoroughly once Justice Asher’s decision was finally made public. This is more than just an embarrassment for the Auckland district health boards; it is a total shambles—it is unprecedented. It demonstrates the absolute folly of having bureaucrats in charge of contract negotiations within the health system a practice that neatly absolves the Minister from direct accountability for outcomes. 
In the case of Labtests Auckland the bureaucrats distracted by the possibility of making big theoretical savings set off in hot pursuit of those savings and basically took their eye off the ball. There was no real guarantee of savings once the dust had even settled and one of the most alarming aspects of this particular situation is that such debacles will continue to occur because health board officials are heavily influenced by funding restraints and that skews their judgment away from patient welfare. 
We have seen lots of examples of this—this is not just an Auckland issue. In fact the very same thing is happening right in my home town of Cambridge where we will soon be down to having one laboratory service for the town and the whole surrounding area rather than the four laboratories we currently have. Even I know that with just one laboratory in Cambridge it will be hard-pressed to cope and many of the elderly in the community will find it very very hard to travel the extra distance necessary to obtain their tests—let alone to find parking when a lab is right in the centre of town. At present those elderly people can actually walk when they desire to do so and can do so. 
I think we need to remember that health services and the testing that goes with health services are essential services. The fiasco we are witnessing in Auckland cannot be allowed to reoccur; accountability has to be restored. The present system we have gives the Minister of Health a “get home free” card whenever questions of accountability rise. That is not right. It is the all care but no responsibility attitude and it is not working. No one in the health system appears to be responsible or accountable for anything and on the very rare occasion that heads do roll they are usually very little heads from way down in the pecking order. 
With reference to the Labtests Auckland issues I can tell members that over the next few months there will have to be a real scramble to ensure that Aucklanders have adequate testing available and this mess will have to be sorted out and unravelled. This is a situation that should never have arisen and should definitely not be allowed to happen again. A conflict of interest was always a possibility; the lines were blurred. It was an accident just waiting to happen. What will we see next? The next most expensive area of conflict between district health boards and health professionals looks likely to be that between district health boards and pharmacists. Again who will be the casualty but the patients. They will have to pay extra when they collect their prescriptions and often it is the elderly who can ill afford the extra money or even the stress involved with this. 
Last year’s round of strikes impacted on all of those people who cannot afford to go privately for medical procedures and any further strikes this year will affect the same people again. All of this makes a really compelling argument in support of the New Zealand First policy of restoring ministerial accountability for health outcomes. That has to happen. The Minister of Health has to be directly accountable for the performance of the health system and for all of those areas under his jurisdiction. Basically the buck has to stop squarely at his door—and the sooner it does that the better.