Government Policy Has CDHB Corporate Office In Disarray

An internal memo from the CDHB ceo leaked to Democrats for Social Credit health spokesman David Tranter shows just how far government's enforced surgery policy has DHB corporate management in disarray over their politically driven surgery agendas.

According to the memo a patient who had been unable to access treatment for up to five years but who started receiving it within weeks of CEO Gordon Davies' intervention, would have been attended to under the DHB's normal processes Mr. Tranter said (relevant passage states, "His two major problems have been attended to without any significant action from me. It was reassuring to be so close to a deserving case and to see our system respond in the way we would like to"). However, given the history of the DHB's stone-walling of the many approaches by the patient's G.P. and my repeated unsuccessful appeals to them as his advocate, it is quite clear that without the ceo's intervention after I approached him directly the patient would have continued as another victim of the government's insane surgery rationing policy. While Gordon Davies' humanitarian intervention is deeply appreciated in this case, the corporate health management desperation government is causing is revealed when a ceo feels compelled to tell staff that a clearly failing surgery management process is working well. The latest CDHB developments brought about by the near-unanimous protest of their surgeons clearly shows that the claim that their system was responding "in the way we would like it to" is factually incorrect.

My extensive fruitless dealings over this matter with CDHB bureaucrats which have included being misled by one of their waiting list managers over a supposed communication with the patient's G.P. - a communication which the G.P. vehemently denied as having taken place - bear out Philip Bagshaw's view that there is too much bureaucracy in DHB management. The case referred to above - and the experience of patients throughout New Zealand - clearly demonstrates that the bureaucratic empire-building under National's 1993 corporatisation of health system management has diverted untold health funding away from treatment and placed a bureaucratic brick wall between patients and the medical professionals who should be treating them, Mr. Tranter said.

ENDS

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