Blue Jackie: Budget Debate 
Blue Jackie: Budget Debate 
[Volume:647;Page:16431] 
Dr JACKIE BLUE (National) 
: 
 We had Vote Health last week. It came and it went. We learnt that it has gone up by $750 million to almost $12 billion a year. The fact is that it has doubled in the last 9 years since Labour took office to $12 billion a year. I looked very hard in the document. I wanted to find out where the vision was and I was very disappointed. I wanted to find out where the answers were and where the solutions were to our health issues. I could not find anything; absolutely nothing at all. I searched for the answer for a particular woman I have been in communication with. She is an elderly lady whose urgent cardiac surgery has been deferred twice. It turns out that she has an aneurysm and if this aneurysm bursts it will be life-threatening. It is pretty serious. Her surgery has been deferred twice and the reason why I found out from the manager of the district health board is that there were not enough intensive care nurses. I looked for the vision of how we are going to sort out our health worker issues. How are we going to get more nurses? I could not see any rationale or any solutions in the Budget. 
All this Government can do and all it has done in the last 9 years is produce health workforce report after report—42 more in fact. The New Zealand Nurses Organisation estimates that we are short of up to 2000 nurses. We have an ageing health workforce in every part of the health sector whether it is pathology radiology—you name it we are an ageing health workforce. We have a workforce that is supported largely by overseas-trained doctors. Quite frankly if we did not have that input we would not have a health workforce at all. Did the Budget have any answers for this? No it did not. There was no vision at all. 
National has a vision. John Key recently announced a solution to the medical health workforce problems. Yesterday he announced that National would be looking at voluntary bonding of newly graduated medical students to work in rural or hard to staff areas and it would look at writing off their loans. This visionary announcement has been very much welcomed by the New Zealand Medical Association and also by the New Zealand Medical Students’ Association. That solution has vision but the Budget did not have vision. The fact is that under 9 years of a Labour Government patients are waiting to see specialists; they are waiting waiting waiting. There are fewer first specialist assessments fewer patients are being seen and fewer elective surgeries. Patients are simply waiting longer and longer. There have been fewer elective surgeries after a $6 billion increase in Vote Health each year. 
What about Labour’s answers to the growing number of patients? I certainly hope we do not go back to the answer of 2006 when Labour culled an estimated 35000 patients from waiting lists nationwide all because they were waiting. Labour’s answer was to cull the patients and send them back to their general practitioners even though their specialists had said that surgery was the best option. It was cynical data-cleansing at best. What about people who need elective surgeries for hernias or varicose veins? These conditions are not life-threatening but they do cause a lot of pain and suffering. People with these conditions cannot get operations under district health boards in this day and age. They do not have an option; they just have to suffer. 
Did this Budget have the answer to bureaucracy and the lack of productivity in the health sector? In fact the health bureaucracy has been growing like the bureaucracy in all other sectors of Government departments. We know that the number of nurses and doctors employed by the district health boards has grown by 28 percent but over the same period the number of people employed in the Ministry of Health has increased by 51 percent. The number of district health board managers and administrators has increased by more than 1800 since 2001. We need just to look at the proliferation of health workforce documents strategies and plans—you name it—to see why we have been drowning in bureaucracy. 
National has vision and in our  
Better Sooner More Convenient 
 health vision document we talk about what we will do for bureaucracy. National will increase productivity by re-engaging the health professionals promoting clinical leadership and making greater use of the private sector. It is all in our health discussion document; it is all there. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: What does that mean—re-engaging the health professionals? 
Dr JACKIE BLUE 
: I say to Mr Cosgrove that he should read the document and he might learn something. 
Chris Tremain 
: It’s not in comic form. 
Dr JACKIE BLUE 
: That is right! It is not all just pictures. There are lots of words and members do have to read each word for it to make sense. 
I will tell Mr Cosgrove about something that is in the Budget. An amount of $154 million was recently announced for the cervical cancer vaccine and it was absolutely welcomed. It is very interesting to go back to the original announcement which was made at the Labour Party conference in November last year. The Prime Minister announced that she was asking the Ministry of Health to make haste on advising our Government of these developments. This occurred after the United Kingdom had announced its own cervical cancer vaccine—hence the announcement at the Labour Party conference that the Prime Minister was asking the Ministry of Health officials to look urgently into this matter. That is all well and good. If she was so worried about the health of women in New Zealand why did she not act a year earlier when the Australians had announced their cervical cancer vaccine programme? Why did she wait for the United Kingdom to suddenly announce its programme? 
I was very interested in the timing of all this. I asked under the Official Information Act for the Ministry of Health to find out the exacting timing of when the Prime Minister had asked for information on the cervical cancer vaccine programme. I got different dates. The Director-General of Health told me the briefing was requested on 2 November and then in response to another Official Information Act request I was told by the Deputy Director-General of Health that it was 5 November a day or two after the Labour Party conference. All in all the varying dates and the fact it was announced at the Labour Party conference make me think this was policy on the hoof and it was political. If our Prime Minister was truly worried about cervical cancer she would have made the announcement a year earlier in late 2006 when the Australian Government our nearest neighbour announced its programme. She would not have waited for the UK announcement. This was cynicism at is best. 
Another interesting omission in the Budget in Vote Health was that no budget was mentioned for pharmaceuticals. That was very interesting. Our pharmaceutical spending has been very poor. It has been going down steadily and flat-lining over several years. This Budget does not have the answer for people like little James who is 5 years of age. I got to know him and his family very well. James has a special condition that affects his oesophagus and makes it quite inflamed. He cannot eat or drink very well and he needs special food to give him nutrition. Unfortunately the supplement he needed was not funded by Pharmac. The only funded supplement was a foul-tasting supplement that he had to have large quantities of. James is only 5 and to a 5-year-old’s palate this medicine was difficult literally to get down. So it was hard for this little boy. His mother and his specialist lobbied Pharmac. They went to the Exceptional Circumstances panel on numerous occasions to try to get the supplement funded. They had no luck whatsoever. The postscript to this is that it looks as if the medicine will be funded but it is too late for this family. They left to go to Australia where the medicine is fully funded. 
That family have joined the 200 Kiwis who leave our shores every week to go to Australia. They are among the people who are voting with their feet and leaving New Zealand and that is to our detriment. Did Vote Health in this Budget have the answer to the problems in our emergency departments where people have to wait in corridors where there is bed blocking and where people try to see a doctor but cannot? All in all this is a very disappointing Vote Health Budget. It had no solutions no vision and unfortunately New Zealanders will have to wait for the election in order to get some real vision.