A patient advocate hopes the taskforce set up by the Government to tackle long-standing delays in hospital waiting lists will be "really brave" in addressing the issue.
Health Minister Andrew Little unveiled the taskforce on Wednesday, which is being led by Counties Manukau chief medical officer Andrew Connolly.
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, around 8000 people were waiting more than four months to access treatment. Now around 27,000 people are waiting.
Penny Tucker, who is working with Patient Voice Aotearoa, is not convinced another taskforce will fix the issue.
READ MORE: Special taskforce unveiled to tackle hospital waiting list delays
"I don't think it takes another taskforce, which is a working group dressed in drag, to fix it. It just takes reconstituting what was actually working pretty well," she told Breakfast.
For Tucker, this was National Health Targets, the public reporting of which were axed in August 2017. They measured DHBs' performance of procedures including surgeries, cancer treatment, emergency department waiting times and child immunisations.
"That's what I think this working group, taskforce, whatever it wants to call itself, needs to focus on is how to get back that focus on patient-centric treatment."
Tucker said waiting list delays had become "measurably worse than they need to be", with patients feeling like they have been "parked in a waiting room to die".
"It shouldn't be this hard and it shouldn't be this discriminatory and we shouldn't in New Zealand have a two-tier health system where some people literally feel like they've been picked to die."
Although she had "great faith" in Connolly as he is an "exceptional physician", Tucker said she was concerned about the taskforce's timeliness.
"I hope that the taskforce is really brave and I hope that they write a report that is actually quite clinical in what it suggests the Government does and my fear is ... if it's too confronting, I'm not actually sure that the Government will do anything with it before they've sanitised and spun it. For our patients, this is urgent," Tucker said.
"I'm hoping that he [Connolly] brings that degree of pragmatism to this role, because at the end of the day we've got enough reports from this Government to have doorstops and we're putting tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, into reconstituting, restructuring, re-managing and centralising our health system."
The head of the taskforce, Andrew Connolly, says it is a big challenge but one that is necessary. (Source: Breakfast)
The taskforce is responsible for delivering a national plan by September.
"If you've got a family member diagnosed with cancer or a rare disease - which is complicated enough to deal with - to have somebody say 'well in September we might do a report and then it will go through complicated MOH processes and then we'll work out what to do with it and then we'll work out how to present it and then maybe, out of that, we'll work out what to do a few months down the track'. You could be dead by then," Tucker exclaimed.
"In our view, there's actually a fairly quick solve which doesn't involve great resources."
Appearing in response to Tucker, Connolly acknowledged there was a "big challenge" ahead, remarking it was a necessary one "and one that we intend to tackle relentlessly".
He said due to the Government's health reforms "we have an opportunity to look at solutions across boundaries so those artificial barriers are removed".
Connolly told people to judge the taskforce on its progress in the coming months.
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