Concerns Grow Over Lack Of Oversight In Private Healthcare

Recent moves by Health NZ to push for greater reliance on private healthcare raise serious concerns about patient safety and accountability.

Health Minister Simeon Brown is correct we do need timely and equitable access to quality care. However, there is a crucial distinction between quality health care and safe health care. While Aotearoa New Zealand strives for high-quality healthcare, quality does not always mean safety.

Quality Health Care versus Safe Health Care

Quality care encompasses a broader concept, aiming for best possible outcomes:

• Quality health care focuses on efficiency, access, and outcomes—ensuring services are timely, effective, and equitable.
• Safe health care focuses on ensuring patients are not harmed in the process of receiving care. This means preventing avoidable injuries, misdiagnoses, medication errors, and systemic failures.

Private hospitals rely heavily on individual practitioners and medical colleges who are responsible for upholding safety standards through training and credentialing. However, their own internal credentialing processes often go unchecked, there is no robust system to monitor harm, let alone report it.

When things go wrong, it is the public healthcare system that is left to deal with the consequences—without adequate mechanisms in place to track and prevent further harm. How will this Government ensure proper oversight when harm reporting remains fragmented?

New Zealand’s current reporting systems remain siloed, with limited transparency and accountability. Without proper legislative oversight there is no clear way to ensure patient safety across both public and private healthcare. The Government must urgently address these gaps and implement a comprehensive system for monitoring harm in private hospitals, before changes are made to privatise our health system any further.

This issue highlights the broader need for truly independent oversight of the entire health sector. Existing health entities lack true independence, undermining their ability to provide impartial monitoring and enforcement.

Relieving the pressure on our overstretched health system is necessary, but without strong oversight, private hospitals may prioritise efficiency and financial incentives over safety, leaving patients vulnerable to harm.

A System-Wide Approach to Patient Safety

The creation of the Health NZ Board is a step toward better hospital management, but it does not address broader patient safety issues across all healthcare settings. A Patient Safety Commissioner would:

• identify and prevent systemic failures before they cause harm;
• ensure patient voices shape healthcare policy;
• promote accountability across hospitals, general practice, aged care, and community health;
• ensure transparency in reporting and responding to medical harm.

Independent oversight is critical to ensuring safety, transparency, and trust in both public and private healthcare.

A Call to Action

The Health Consumer Advocacy Alliance are calling for an independent oversight role to ensure accountability across the entire health system.

New Zealanders deserve a health system where safety is a priority, not an afterthought.

“We are urging the Government to establish an independent Patient Safety Commissioner—one that is truly independent of health entities and decision-makers.

The time for meaningful reform is now. We cannot afford to wait while preventable harm continues in our health system.”

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