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Treasury documents reveal deep concerns over Health NZ’s financial management

Health NZ news
Health NZ chief executive (Inset).

Newly released Treasury documents reveal significant concerns regarding Health New Zealand’s (HNZ) financial management, as officials feared that leadership within the organisation lacked a clear understanding of its financial state.

Treasury highlighted the precarious situation, describing a “generally bad” relationship between HNZ’s national office and frontline staff, low morale, and weak internal controls.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis criticised the former HNZ board for its alleged failure to monitor declining productivity and urged Health Minister Dr. Shane Reti to intervene, expressing a lack of confidence in the board’s ability to oversee crucial budget and performance metrics.

Treasury said Commissioner Lester Levy’s challenging task of reducing HNZ’s spending by $2 billion in an environment strained by overspending on nursing and an anticipated near $1 billion deficit.

The reports, spanning from January to July, bolster Treasury’s frustration with HNZ’s internal communication and data reliability, stating that “no one inside HNZ appears to have a clear picture of what is going on.”

Treasury cautioned that achieving financial and operational targets for 2023/24 would likely necessitate service reductions, further complicating HNZ’s ability to meet healthcare needs.

Additional documents revealed that Levy’s appointment as commissioner was an attempt to consolidate leadership, but Treasury warned that this move placed an “exceptional burden” on him as he faced strong internal resistance.

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5 COMMENTS

  1. Maybe it’s time to know the numbers.
    How many individuals are sitting on wait lists and how are these being managed?
    Has the ED demand increased and why?
    How many beds are fully occupied, the average length of stay and why?
    What are the conditions that are causing the need for additional resource?

    Let us understand the fundamentals. Is it vaccine related injuries, an ageing population, the surgical backlog post Covid or the levels of immigration requiring health services, the Doctor shortage or Management ineptness …..creating the problems?

    Nursing recruitment being attributed (MSM reports today) looks to be a red herring distraction …there has to be more to this.

  2. It’s good to see Nicola calling out overspending on nurses. Today’s medical world seems to be a global competition for staff. I’m not a nurse. I know little about hospitals. But I do know something about people changing employers for better pay and conditions.

    The only way to reduce the price of something that is in demand is to have too much of it. i.e. Perhaps a little more focus on having more nurses trained up in NZ with rules of lower fees in exchange for bonding employment in NZ.

    I don’t know what it costs to train a nurse. But I do know universities are very well off and invest profits into property to reduce tax. Empire growing rather than education. There are a lot of rich universities and a lot of poor student nurses who have to seek better income to pay off the profits universities make.

  3. Look at the caliber of the individuals in leading positions. All placed there because of the nonsense of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI).
    A CEO of Health NZ who doesn’t even know the year she was born.
    Others with no real experience in the front-lines or totally foreign to the field of medicine, and having been handed cushy jobs by others who also climbed imto positions without MERIT and COMPETENCE.
    Most of these functionaries have been in the medical-corporate field for decades and are directly responsible of where Health New Zealand is nowadays.
    Try to replace a brown person with a more capable leader who shows integrity and capability, all hell would break lose.
    DEI, gender equality and blatant racism is bringing Godzone to where it is now: a third world cuntry where citizens lose faith in governance rapidly.

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