This Labour Government promoted itself as the most open and transparent government ever. It was, of course, a slogan, nothing more. The reality is that this Government is dishonest, dissembling, disingenuous, and duplicitous. This is particularly egregious regarding OIA responses, even landing minister Jan Tinetti before the powerful Privileges Committee of Parliament.
The latest shenanigans regarding OIA requests have shown that Te Whatu Ora/Health NZ are one of the worst offenders, so much so that they’ve been ticked off by the Ombudsman’s office:
Te Whatu Ora-Health New Zealand has been rebuked by the Ombudsman’s office for “unacceptable” delays in releasing public information about safety in hospitals.
Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier upheld two related complaints from the Herald after an Official Information Act request for data held by the former district health boards on unsafe staffing levels was significantly delayed and incomplete.
In the two decisions, which have not been reported until now, Boshier said his investigations concluded that the national health authority had failed to meet the disclosure requirements imposed by the OIA.
“I am sorry that this has occurred. To me, it is unacceptable,” Boshier said.
The Chief Ombudsman said he has put Te Whatu Ora on notice that he will be monitoring its compliance with the disclosure laws and “drawing public attention to cases where there is demonstrable non-compliance”.
“I have reported my final opinion to the Minister of Health [Ayesha Verrall].”
The Ombudsman was already conducting a broader investigation into the handling of OIA requests at Te Whatu Ora and several other departments, including the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) and Treasury. That inquiry is ongoing.
The Herald complaint highlights the problems in obtaining data about health services that have plagued Te Whatu Ora since it was created through the merger of 20 district health boards in July last year. In this case, the delays were largely due to difficulties in collating the figures from various regions that do not share the same processes and systems.
“The timeliness of those responses was not what we strive to achieve”, said Peter Alsop, Te Whatu Ora’s chief of staff.
Te Whatu Ora is working on improving its disclosure processes and “making good progress”, he added.
NZ Herald
And it gets worse. Radio NZ reports on Te Whatu Ora producing flim-flam statistics or no statistics at all for months on end:
Publicly available health data on wait times for emergency departments, operations and cancer treatment are now six months out of date, since Te Whatu Ora was forced to pull inaccurate figures from its website.
That has caused disquiet among some clinicians and patient groups about what they say is the lack of transparency.
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists head Sarah Dalton said health data mattered because it underpinned core decisions about funding priorities and treatment for patients.
“There’s not clearly communicated ‘here we are, there’s our destination, here’s how we’re going to get there’, which is really critical, whether it’s emergency wait times, first specialist appointments, planned care, bed block, ramping – but also vacancy rates, which absolutely feed into those things.”
Radio NZ
Before the government’s health reforms, these data were published regularly and reliably. Now we have no data to measure how well the health system is performing or if it is performing at all.
This is deliberate and dishonest. The government knows the statistics will be bad, so I have no doubt that the word has gone out to slow things down.
To add to the situation are the hopeless and ill-conceived health reforms which anecdotally have made matters far worse, not better as Andrew Little promised. He’s been shovelled off to Defence where the next debacle will land on his plate soon enough when Defence Chiefs finally admit the frigates are poked and they don’t have enough sailors to put both of them to sea.
Nothing this Labour Government has done has improved the situation in any material way. In fact most things are worse. But they just continue to gaslight us all by saying everything is world-class.
It’s a nonsense of course, but it won’t change until these clowns are thrown from office.
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