GUEST BLOG: Ian Powell – When business consultants are commissioned for hatchet jobs in health thedailyblog.co.nz - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thedailyblog.co.nz Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Health systems are delivered by highly committed and skilled health professionals overwhelmingly driven by compassion. Unfortunately many have to work in environments where leadership cultures are antithetical to that compassion.
Broadly speaking the prevailing leadership culture in New Zealandâs health system is managerialism which involves decision-making through a very narrow lens that is management rather than clinically and patient-centred driven. Within district health boards (DHBs) this can be alleviated by the closer proximity between senior managers and health professionals and largely overcome where there is sufficient oxygen to enable genuine engagement between them. The more distributed the engagement at all levels the more clinically and fiscally effective it is.
Can you imagine wrapping every police district with a publicly elected board of earnest amateurs and turning them into silos? It would be equally pointless. But the most glaring cesspit of duplicated waste would have to be local government. Does the team of 5 million really need to be locally lorded over by 77 councils which we don’t eagerly engage with? The vast majority of Kiwis spurn voting in council elections, as is the case with elected health boards. We largely ignore them. Christchurch City Council has just closed submissions on its Long Term Plan. Less than 1 per cent of the population was sufficiently exercised, or felt there was any point, in having their say on the multibillion-dollar budget.
Can you imagine wrapping every police district with a publicly elected board of earnest amateurs and turning them into silos? It would be equally pointless. But the most glaring cesspit of duplicated waste would have to be local government. Does the team of 5 million really need to be locally lorded over by 77 councils which we don’t eagerly engage with? The vast majority of Kiwis spurn voting in council elections, as is the case with elected health boards. We largely ignore them. Christchurch City Council has just closed submissions on its Long Term Plan. Less than 1 per cent of the population was sufficiently exercised, or felt there was any point, in having their say on the multibillion-dollar budget.
Checkpoint the reform plan announced today was the most transparent and least compromised he had read.
Levy is also the chair of the Health Research Council and the Crown Monitor appointed to oversee the troubled Canterbury DHB.
He says if the reforms are implemented properly the new system should be a success, but acknowledges not everyone will like it. People feel that it s centralisation. I think that s going to be an issue, and I think that needs to be really reframed, because it s not centralisation, it s system building, he told
Checkpoint. This has got a regional flavour to it and it s got a locality flavour to it, so it goes down, actually, to districts and locality.