Roy Heather: General Debate 
Roy Heather: General Debate 
[Volume:644;Page:13521] 
HEATHER ROY (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 When the Minister of Health stood up to answer questions in Parliament today those answers could best be described only as extraordinarily arrogant flippant and for the most part totally irrelevant. Quite what oysters have to do with Wellington Hospital I do not know but I suspect they have never been on the menu there or anywhere else in the public health system. 
Instead of answering questions and actually being up front with what exactly has gone on at Wellington Hospital over the past 7 years the Minister resorted to personal attacks on me. Well I have thicker skin than that I say to the Minister. Personal attacks will do nothing not one single thing to address any of the problems that Wellington Hospital is afflicted with at the moment. The Minister has just revealed that he is totally out of touch with everything that is going on in the health sector. 
The Minister then went on to try to pretend that he is the friend of the hard-working doctors nurses and health professionals who are beavering away at the coalface at Wellington Hospital and of those employed at the Capital and Coast District Health Board. Those people are not fooled for one moment. I suspect that I have spoken to dozens more doctors and nurses than the Minister has in the last week. If he really cared about what is happening at Wellington Hospital then he would have investigated the budget. He would have looked at where the money is being spent and at where it is not going. He would have picked up that a terrible dissociation has developed between the management and the clinical staff. The rift is so great that neither the clinicians nor the management actually have any confidence in each other. There is a great deal of mistrust. That is reflected in the drop in confidence that the people of Wellington have had about their public health service. For the Minister to totally ignore those things shows just how out of touch he is. 
Minister Cunliffe—the self-professed socialist who can count—obviously has not bothered to count how many people are on waiting lists at Wellington Hospital. He obviously has not bothered to count the dollars being spent not only at the Capital and Coast District Health Board but also elsewhere around the country and I suspect that that is because he cannot count. I think he has been very slow to come up to speed with his new portfolio. He has been extraordinarily slow to act. He cannot decide. The reason we are to get an announcement some time in the next week is that he cannot actually decide what he is going to do with this issue which is proving to be a huge embarrassment for the Government. 
What needs to happen is very clear. A commissioner should have been put in place years ago. At the very least the Minister should be announcing today that an independent commissioner will be put in place to deal with the problems that exist. That person has to be independent has to have a proven track record of turning organisations around and has to be able to think outside the square because innovative ideas and a brave approach is needed at this district health board which is in terminal crisis. 
The Minister is quite right; the hard-working doctors nurses and health professionals need support and they need it immediately. They need it from him. He who is aggregating responsibility for the crisis we are currently experiencing is doing no favours for these hard-working health professionals. There is talk of the Minister again just putting a few of his cronies into the appointed positions at the district health board. The membership of the district health boards changes over next week on 10 December. If all the Minister is to do is ministerial namby-pamby tinkering then that will solve absolutely nothing and Wellingtonians will be able to look forward only to more of the same. 
The Minister never answered the question I asked him in Parliament today. I asked him how many more people needed to die at Wellington Hospital before he would consider sacking the board doing the right thing and putting in place an independent commissioner who could tackle the real issues. There must be no political interference with this independent commissioner. We should forget the meddling that has gone on by the Ministry of Health and the Minister’s office with the 21 district health boards up and down the length and breadth of this country. There should be no political interference. The commissioner needs to be able to have a free rein to put in a team of his or her own with confidence in order to change the culture at Wellington Hospital. 
The commissioner should first address the financial statements that have been of huge concern since the district health board was put in place in 2001 and then deal with the culture that exists at Wellington Hospital. Anybody working at Wellington Hospital will say freely that it is a very unhappy place to be working in. People tell me that freely. Once upon a time they tried to cover that up but it is an extraordinarily unhappy place and the sooner a commissioner is put in place the better.