Kedgley Sue: General Debate 
Kedgley Sue: General Debate 
[Volume:675;Page:14406] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 Today 20 February is something of a “Green letter day” because today finally after 8 years of our requesting the information the Government has begun to release some of the documentation about adverse events in hospitals in New Zealand. For 8 years the Green Party—year after year like a broken record—has been calling for consistent public documentation of how many adverse events are taking place in our hospitals. Finally we have begun to see some of the data. 
The data is chilling; it is horrifying. But apart from the horrifying reading that all of the documentation provides it also shows that sadly the entire system of adverse events reporting in New Zealand is still a complete shambles with different district health boards using different systems definitions and reporting. Some choose not to bother to report adverse events at all; Tairawhiti District Health Board for example did not bother. The entire system is voluntary. It is up to district health boards to decide what to report—or whether to bother. Then we have the huge discrepancies. Capital and Coast District Health Board ambled into the Health Committee today. It officially released information about its serious and sentinel events—that is official information—then we learnt that completely different statistics on those same events were released today by the same district health board. Whom on earth do we trust? 
Through the Green Party’s raising of this issue in the Health Committee we have written to the Minister of Health but Minister after Minister has refused to divulge the statistics. We asked for every district health board as part of its annual report to show its statistics on how many adverse events there had been. Here we are 8 years later and despite the documentation released today we still do not know even basic information: how many medication errors there have been the infection rates and how many surgical deaths occurred in our hospitals last year. In the House today the Minister refused to answer a simple question and divulge how many people died last year as a result of a district health board failing to take some action or taking some action. How many deaths were there? How many people were permanently disabled as a result of a medical error or an adverse event? The Minister refused to answer those questions. He is trying to fudge. The statistics talk about different things; one lot talks about preventable deaths and another lot talks about different forms. The Minister pretended he did not know the answer. We know that the Minister knows only too well and does not want to tell New Zealanders the truth. 
These statistics are simply the tip of the iceberg. They do not even include simple things like data on hospital-acquired infections even though adverse events ordinarily include them. We simply have no idea of how many people are suffering for example from hospital-acquired infections in New Zealand hospitals. Last year the Health Committee was assured by Capital and Coast District Health Board that it had a policy of open disclosure in reporting adverse events. But then we discovered that at the same time that it was telling us that it had been locked in a 2-year battle with the  
Dominion Post 
 over its refusal to disclose its adverse events—its deaths and serious disabilities. It was only the intervention of the Ombudsman that made that board—forced it to kicking and screaming—reveal its figures. 
I believe that the only reason we have these reports today inadequate though they are is that district health boards have been forced and the Minister of Health and the Government have been forced kicking and screaming to divulge these statistics even though Minister after Minister for 8 long years has refused until now to divulge them. We know that every single adverse event costs about $10200 yet every district health board that reports to the Health Committee has refused to answer the question of how much adverse events cost it. Here the boards say: “We don’t collect this data.”—which is all they need to say. Capital and Coast District Health Board told us this morning that it had 1009 adverse events that included patient harm. If we add up $10200 for each of those 1009 events we find that they cost the board about $10 million a year. But the board is trying to hide that as well.