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Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Tony Ryall – the great communicator


Nats to target waiting times
Hospitals will be forced to cut waiting times in emergency departments under tough new targets being set by the Government, Health Minister Tony Ryall says. Speaking to the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine Conference yesterday, Mr Ryall said New Zealanders were increasingly concerned about "hospital gridlock", but poorly performing district health boards were "usually excused and praised by the previous government". He said the National-led Government would introduce new targets - including waiting times in emergency departments - and holding boards and management responsible for meeting them. "No longer will it be acceptable for DHBs to leave patients waiting endlessly." He said the Government would consult clinicians on setting targets so quality of care would be improved, "not compromised".

Ahhh, Tony Ryall – the great communicator, we haven’t really seen much of Tony, the last formal discussion was almost 18 months ago when he and John Key hosted that abortion of a press conference on National’s Health policy and they cocked it up so bad that they were outed by Journalists at the press conference that their Health Policy would actually cost people more because their policy is written by the private health industry and neither Tony or John seemed to be aware of that. It was after that abortion of a press conference that John Key did not do one formal set interview with Journalists until the election, in fact he is yet to do a formal one with all journalists, don’t expect that to change when he gets back from jet setting, but let’s look at what the great communicator is saying here, the only difference between the Health Policy Trevor Mallard leaked and the one National went with was the building of 20 new ‘clinics’ – I have been arguing that the reason National hid that was because this is their first step to privatize health, Tony will invest all this money into new clinics which surprise surprise will end up in the hands of his mates in the private health industry but note how he is selling this to you in this news story, the aim is to bring down waiting times, so the answer won’t be extra investment into the Public Health system, it will be investment into the private health system.

2 Comments:

At 25/11/08 12:22 pm, Blogger Tim Selwyn said...

The problem Ryall might encounter is that the hospitals will start fudging the stats - if they are being measured on those stats. The pressure will go on staff - from management - to find reasons not to count the bad stats.

 
At 25/11/08 4:54 pm, Blogger Steve Withers said...

I hope Tony Ryall isn't putting public money into private pockets for health care delivery.

We know all too well where that leads.....and it isn't good service at a decent price.

 

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