Taranaki health – are we there yet? No, but on our way

Just over three months ago on July 1, New Zealand’s health service started its most significant overhaul in more than 20 years when all the district health boards became one with Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand – and our former DHB became Te Whatu Ora Taranaki.

To undertake this reform over the next two to three years, Te Whatu Ora will be working closely with Te Aka Whai Ora (the new Māori Health Authority) and the Ministry of Health.

The reform was undertaken because there was a clear need to build a health system for the 21st century to deliver a people-centred, equitable, accessible and cohesive service that will be nationally planned, regionally delivered and locally tailored.

We are clearly not there yet, but we are on our way and starting to see benefits from a unified, national focus on health issues such as reducing the lists for people who have been waiting 365 days or longer for care.

More than half of the 5405 people around New Zealand waiting longer than a year for treatment as of July 1 have now been treated, scheduled or discharged.

As a district we will start to see improvements in staffing recruitment now that New Zealand’s borders are open, and Te Whatu Ora undertakes a significant recruitment drive. In addition, we are actively driving our own ‘‘Join Us’’ recruitment campaign and promoting The Return to Nursing Fund which is designed to remove financial barriers for nurses who wish to return to nursing but need to complete additional training because of their time out of the workforce.

More staff working in our district hospitals means we will be able to continue decreasing the waiting times for planned surgery, the wait times in our emergency departments and enhance our ability to deliver core services such as maternity and mental health.

As our Project Maunga hospital rebuild programme continues we will be able to provide better health services in state-of-the art facilities that will also be very attractive for new staff.

Our new Renal Centre is moving towards completion and the opening of this facility later this year. We are about to break ground on our new Cancer Centre.

And as you may have seen with ‘‘Lofty’’ the crane on the skyline, we are making great progress with the build of our new East Wing building.

This 20,000 square metre, sixstorey building will house many of Taranaki Base Hospital’s acute clinical services, including ED, ICU, Maternity, Primary Birthing, Neonatal, Radiology, Laboratory and a roof-top helipad.

Right now, we have a dedicated team of 2462 health professions who in our last financial year completed more than 3408 elective surgeries, helped give birth to 1334 babies, and attended to more than 47,280 patients through our ED departments.

And they did all this through a pandemic. It hasn’t been easy for them. Yet they worked together as a team to deliver the best health service we can with what we have. Because that is our focus. To deliver the best health service.

To do that, we are fortunate to have an active fundraising arm, The Taranaki Health Foundation, focused on helping us deliver the best health service for the region.

Through the goodwill of the Taranaki community, the foundation has raised millions of dollars for vital equipment that our stretched operational budgets couldn’t afford.

With a unified, national health service aimed at delivering a people-centred, equitable, accessible and cohesive service for all in Taranaki, and our Project Maunga hospital rebuild well on track, Taranaki’s health service has a healthy future.

We are clearly not there yet, but we are on our way.

– Gillian Campbell is the interim district director of Te Whatu Ora Taranaki