Kate Hawkesby: Our health system is in dire straits and it's not even winter yet

So we learn this week what we already knew, but now have confirmation of - our health system is in dire straits. And it's only March. It's not even winter yet. I worry that we've dropped the ball on fixing it by being too slow to react when staffing, in particular, was first being flagged as an issue. We took far too long to get midwives, nurses and doctors onto the residency green list. And by the time we did, guess what? No one wanted to come. They'd already gone elsewhere, found other jobs, other countries that did have their doors open in time, other markets where health care systems, pay, and conditions were preferable. So we are crying out for midwives, nurses and doctors.  We are facing overloaded and overworked ED's and Hospitals, and that's before the winter bugs even strike. Doctors, nurses and midwives are rightfully tearing their hair out with frustration.  And then yesterday – news that the Ministry of Health is spouting incorrect numbers anyway. They don’t even have their stats right. They admitted yesterday that official health figures about emergency department wait times were inaccurate. They called it ‘faulty’.  National’s Dr. Shane Reti called it ‘fudged’. He said it could be chalked up to incompetence and that when he saw the data for ED’s, he knew straight away a massive drop in wait times was incorrect, anecdotally it was also incorrect.  So my question is how had the government just accepted them at face value and published them as official data without checking themselves? How is it Reti could spot this, yet Verrall could not? Reti said the data never made sense, he even got an analyst to have a second look, that analyst also said they made no sense, and yet Ayesha Verrall presumably saw them and didn’t flinch, or never saw them but let them get published without checking anyway – hence now another apology and another walk back by another government department letting us all down.  Not quality assuring the numbers and just spouting ‘gobbledygook’ as Shane Reti put it, is disturbing, this is the management of our catastrophically poor health system. The same health system they spent millions rebranding and merging - and yet they can’t even collect data accurately. How many clowns are running this circus?  Te Whatu Ora said the figures weren’t accurate because they’ve merged 20 different districts that ‘all collected data on different systems in different ways..’ that’s not an excuse. In my view, that’s an admission that too much time and energy has been spent on merging and rebranding and remodelling a health system at an administrative level – wasting time and money basically when frontline health has never been worse.  How can we trust government departments that don’t even check data and are happy to publish inaccurate data? Te Whatu Ora says it’ll ‘improve over time’ but will it? How long do we have to wait for ‘improvement’? And how about the goal is to be accurate and not just ‘to improve’? The very serious outworking’s of this is that important funding goes to the wrong places if incorrect data is used.. how do officials know where to put badly needed resources if there is no correct data?  So a bad week for health, a bad week for the Health Minister, a bad week for Hospitals, and as I said, we’re not even into winter yet.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.