A newspaper reported “Oliver Christiansen’s dad lay dying and asking: “Where is my boy? Where is my boy?”
Oliver Christiansen was prevented access to his dying dad by the Ministry of Health. The Director General fronted on the AM show Tuesday morning to apologize for getting it totally wrong and promise never to get it wrong again. No, of course I’m kidding! Bloomfield fronted to justify the decision and try to convince us that kindness, or in his words, empathy, really matters.
Our PM made a big meal out of kindness during COVID-19. Be kind! Media picked up on it. Be kind! But the great unwashed stopped telling each other to be kind after waking up to ‘kindness is a one-way street’. It only applies to the proletariat because the dictatorship does whatever the hell it wants. The Waitemata District Health Board is one example.
“Nurses are now asking why there were no protocols in place to prevent staff working with Covid-19 patients from also working with other patients, and why health and safety recommendations to that effect were not accepted by management.
“The 57 staff had all been in contact with three nurses who had already tested positive for Covid-19.”
While police and gang members accost people and send them home to their bubbles, at the very hub of the disease, at a hospital, staff complain they are forced to work in a Covid ward and also work in a ward for the aged. The most vulnerable!
Bloomfield weighs into Garner’s accusation that the Health Department got this totally wrong by defending his team. In typical bureaucratic fashion this is double speak for ‘if you have a problem with the Christiansen decision it is because the team is at fault! But don’t worry – I will sort them out’.
“They are really good people and what theY do is apply the criteria objectively, they have to look at all the information fairly, and I can say that they do, of course, apply them with empathy, that’s part of their role, that’s why they work here”
It might be in the Health Board manual to show empathy, it might even be a direct instruction, but Bloomfield’s team demonstrated no kindness whatsoever to blanket refuse 24 applications for Covid lock down rules to be put aside on humanitarian grounds. Why didn’t they show kindness? Bloomfield explains.
“aah… and what they have to balance up, is the information they’ve got, and the risk that might portray or that might carry for public, when we know that people coming in from overseas are the cause of all new infections from overseas; so they have to do that really careful balancing act to weigh up aah… the requests with the overall objective of trying to just really break the chain of transmission in NZ.
“The judge, what I think the judge looked at, was whether it was clear we had followed that process of objectively looking at all the information and had done so… had looked at that information on its merits and the judge felt it wasn’t clear we had done that.”
Indeed, the judge ruled in favour of the one applicant out of all 24 refused access who sought judicial assistance to access a loved one. But do not worry, dear reader, amends will be made because Bloomfield says so.
“I had asked them to relook at the criteria even before this came along, but I have asked them to look at all the other ones we have reviewed over the last few weeks.”
Bloomfield tells us he has gone back to staff and asked them to review all the other applications to make sure they are “carefully and objectively considering all the information.”
But Bloomfield is just as biased as his team. If I were an applicant refused access I’d be screaming from the rooftops, “How can they be objective when their bias is already evident? They will give the same answer as before, which is ‘it’s too risky!’”
Already stuck in the morass, Bloomfield’s efforts to extract himself just entrench him further. “It’s not a blanket one size fits all” he says. Oh dear! Your own staff applied that blanket “one size fits all” when they turned down all 24 applications. There’s none so blind as those who cannot see.
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