Roy Heather: General Debate 
Roy Heather: General Debate 
[Volume:636;Page:6941] 
HEATHER ROY (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 This year 2006 has been a very big year in health and when I say “big” I do not mean big in the sense that a lot of good things have happened but just that a lot has been going on. It has not been a very rewarding year for those who work at the coalface and too many Kiwis who need health care have missed out in 2006. 
Let us look at the round-up. In June there were 5 days when junior doctors went on strike. Just over 2000 junior doctors participated in that strike. Also in June there was a 5-day strike by radiation therapists. In September 250 radiographers went on a 5 day - long strike and in October 260 of them went on a 10 day - long strike which will be fresh in the minds of those who work at the coalface—those who had to cancel patients’ names from waiting lists yet again. In November we have just had a 7 day - long strike which ended this morning with 1200 members of the medical laboratory workers union taking part and next week on 13 December we can expect 3000 hospital service workers to go on strike. 
All is certainly not happy in the health workforce. Health professionals are expected to be grateful for whatever the Government dishes up to them. They often have very little choice if any over whom they work for and unlike other workers in many cases they cannot shop around for better pay and conditions. It is a monopoly situation that benefits nobody—certainly not patients waiting for health care. 
Earlier this year I had a member’s bill to remove Pharmac’s exemption from the provisions of Part 2 of the Commerce Act. It was narrowly defeated but had it been passed it would have given New Zealanders a much greater choice in medicines than they have at the moment. Because of Pharmac and Government policies too many patients are being denied the medicines that would help them with their quality of life. Herceptin was big on the agenda this year in the health area. Research strongly suggests that Herceptin halves the reoccurrence of HER2-positive breast cancer. The Government has a billion dollars to invest in Mr Mallard’s folly on the Auckland waterfront but no money to give to women who have been given a death sentence and no chance of survival. Many of those women are young and the best present they could have had this Christmas from the Government would be the funding of Herceptin. 
Plunket has also suffered at the Government’s hands this year. In the same week that PlunketLine celebrated its 12th birthday it lost the contract to provide Well Child services through Healthline. Plunket has now been able to secure private funding so that PlunketLine can continue. That is a victory of communities and charity over Government interference. 
Pathology services too have been in the news. Diagnostic Medlab has lost its contract to perform tests in Auckland and a new provider with no staff no laboratory and no track record has the contract from 1 July next year. Aucklanders—and the rest of the country should beware—have a valid fear of a looming disaster with regard to their laboratory services. In Wellington patients who are referred for tests by private specialists will have to pay for services that their general practitioners or their public specialists could prescribe and are prescribing for free. Yet again the private sector is being hit. The result will be a disincentive for people to use private health care more pressure on general practitioners and public hospital specialists and a lot of suspicion about the trustworthiness of what are actually very good pathology services. Other district health boards around the country look set to adopt similar strategies to those adopted in Wellington and we will continue to battle for an even playing field for both public and private services. 
The perennial problem of waiting lists continued to worsen in 2006. Tens of thousands of patients face treatment that is either delayed or denied or that is being delivered across the Tasman. Thousands of Kiwis have been sent back to their family doctor by district health boards that have been threatened with losing their funding. However because of the way that the Ministry of Health now collates the figures we have no idea how many patients are actually being short-circuited in this way: how many are being sent back to their general practitioner when in fact in the first place they were sent to a specialist because they needed a second opinion or needed care that their general practitioner was unable to provide. In reality district health boards are the meat in the sandwich; they are the scapegoats caught between patients and politicians. 
We know that the health system is in critical condition but the real inconvenient truth is that it is struggling because of Labour’s failing health policies.