9. Question No. 9—HealthDr SHANE RETI (National) to the Minister of HealthQuestion No. 9—Health9. Dr SHANE RETI (National) to the Minister of Health: What is his response to the independent report into the death of a woman who left the Middlemore emergency department which stated that Middlemore had the worst-ever compliance with the Shorter Stays in ED health target for CMH during the month of June" and which other emergency departments if any also had their worst ever shorter stays in emergency department in June 2022?Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Health): Fakalofa lahi ahu. On behalf of the Government first of all can I just offer my condolences again to the family who are at the centre of the events that were reported on in the report released yesterday. At the time of the event that was the subject of the report Middlemore Hospital was coping with larger than usual numbers of people in their emergency department because of COVID-19 because of the worst flu season in living memory and because a lot of staff were away because of illness. As the report notes staff were doing the best they could under the circumstances. I expect Te Whatu Ora - Health New Zealand to take on board the lessons from the report such as making sure people waiting in emergency departments have good information about what's happening and assessing anybody leaving without treatment. To the second part of the member's question it's only been possible in the time available for Te Whatu Ora - Health New Zealand to pull month-by-month data back to July 2017. From that data set Auckland Hospital achieved 69.3 percent performance and Whakatāne Hospital achieved 84.6 percent. I would caution that June was the start of winter and while it takes time for data to be processed I would expect we will see that pressure on emergency departments was sustained throughout the winter months this year.Dr Shane Reti: What is his response to Dr John Bonning from the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine who said that the emergency department (ED) wait-time crisis was the worst he'd seen in his career and that "The graphs and the pictures of the amount of time people wait in emergency departments is quite stark. [In] 2015 we were performing really really well and it's just gone obviously to pot" and it's not some COVID blip?Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I note the comments by Dr John Bonning and I also note the comments in a 2019 International Journal of Health Policy and Management report a research report published about the targets as they were applied from 2009 under the previous Government. It was an excoriating report about how those targets had been implemented and it made this finding. It said that "National's policy resulted in gaming behaviour in the form of clock-stopping and decanting patients to short-stay units or observation beds to avoid target breaches." The way the targets have been applied under this Government and the measures that have been applied have been consistent with what you would expect patient management to be not being dodgy and manipulative like they were under the previous Government. Dr Shane Reti: Why then did the Labour Government retire National's public health targets including the target for shorter wait times in hospital emergency departments when the New Zealand Medical Journal reported in 2017 that ED targets help reduce ED deaths by 57 percent for an estimated saving of 700 lives in one year alone?Hon ANDREW LITTLE: Sadly the member's got it wrong yet again. The targets have not been retired. Dr Shane Reti: What is his response to the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine chair Dr Kate Allan who said that in her 15 years of working as an emergency specialist doctor she had never seen it this bad saying "Every emergency department doctor is worried that there will be more cases like the one in June because it is a reality of most emergency departments every day."? Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I go back to my first answer. The reality is that this winter has been one of the most challenging and one of the hardest for the health profession that we have ever seen. We've not only had the ongoing prevalence of COVID-19; we've had the worst flu season that every clinician I speak to says they have ever known and we've had elevated levels of staff absenteeism for perfectly explicable and justifiable reasons. And the important thing however is that we know that we inherited a health system that was underfunded that was poorly resourced. That's why we've increased resourcing by nearly 45 percent we've funded an additional 5000 nurse roles in our public health system and we're now going through the very challenging process of recruiting into those roles in an international climate where the worldwide health workforce is about 2 million short.Dr Shane Reti: Why did he just say that the Government did not retire health targets when in written parliamentary question 14016 he wrote "The previous health targets were retired in June 2021."?Hon ANDREW LITTLE: The targets the member refers to are still measures that are applied and ED departments around the country are measured against that measure."