Category: New Zealand Associations and Organisaitons

Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Five-day junior doctors’ strike begins

Thousands of junior doctors are walking off the job from 8am, for their longest strike yet. It’s the fifth strike by the members of the Resident Doctors Association and this time will run for five days in all regions except Canterbury, which has been spared due to the Christchurch terror attacks. Members will also protest outside the Health Minister David Clark’s office in Dunedin on Monday. Courtney Brown is a junior doctor at Hutt Valley DHB, and is the president of the Resident Doctors’ Association.

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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Health Minister warns Waikato DHB over growing deficit

The Health Minister is poised to sack the entire Waikato District Health Board and replace it with a commissioner. David Clark has told the embattled DHB he’s seriously dissatisfied with its performance and increasingly worried about its growing deficit. He’s giving the board two weeks to tell him what they think before he makes a final decision. Mr Clark is not commenting further.

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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Q&A: ‘Medical manslaughter’ a growing worry

A UK neurologist and medical law campaigner just visited the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences to discuss “medical manslaughter” – when doctors are charged over the deaths of patients. Dr Jenny Vaughan was the medical lead for a group that helped overturn the conviction of a UK consultant surgeon, Dr David Sellu. Since these events, grassroots support has grown from thousands of healthcare in support of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba, a trainee paediatrician who was convicted of manslaughter in 2014 after the death of a child in Leicester. Thousands of frontline medical staff crowd-funded a campaign and successfully overturned a court decision to erase her from the UK medical register. Her case proved huge in the UK, for a profession at breaking point. At the Doctor’s Association UK, advocates have worked with national organisations and the media in order to highlight how healthcare staff are working on critically under-staffed wards and in under-resourced departments, with an increasingly unmanageable workload.

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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: New Zealand Medical Students Support Ban on Semi-Automatic Weapons

In the wake of the terrorist attack on the Muslim community in Christchurch, New Zealand’s medical students strongly support the Government’s ban on military style semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazines, which will progress through Parliament this week. “Every possible step must be taken to ensure a tragedy like this never happens again in our country,” says the President of the New Zealand Medical Students’ Association (NZMSA), Fraser Jeffery. “These weapons can too easily be modified to take multiple human lives in a short space of time and should not be in the hands of private citizens.”

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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Dr Khalid Shah: ‘I’ve never had such a sense of belonging in NZ’

In an effort to hear more from Muslim voices following of the Christchurch mosque attacks, this week Kyle MacDonald gives his column over to Dr Khalid Shah, a trainee GP in Auckland. Dr Shah has a special interest in cross-cultural psychiatry and is a member of the Muslim community.

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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: DHBs face million dollar bills after underpaying holiday pay

Thousands of health workers may be owed millions of dollars because of years of underpayments under the Holidays Act. But after three years trying to untangle the mess, the district health boards are still unable to say just how many of their 70,000 workers are owed how much. Phil Pennington reports.

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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Poor housing costing taxpayers $145m a year – report

A day after the Government announced tough new insulation and heating standards for rental homes, new research from the University of Otago says poor housing conditions cost taxpayers more than $145 million a year in ACC claims and hospitalisation costs. It says those costs were solely attributable to homes that were cold, damp, mouldy, or dangerous to live in. The study’s co-author, Dr Lynn Riggs, speaks to Philippa Tolley.

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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Insurers funding record healthcare as access to public system worsens

Health insurers have been funding record levels of healthcare and covering more surgery as DHBs struggle to meet people’s needs in a reasonable timeframe, the Health Funds Association (HFANZ) said today.
Commenting on the release of health insurance statistics for the 2018 year, HFANZ chief executive Roger Styles said health insurance was actually providing a safety net to the public system for those who have it.
“It’s clear we have not seen any improvement in access to public surgery in the past year. If anything it seems to have got worse,” Mr Styles said.
He said there had been huge disruption in the public hospital sector, with waves of industrial action having an adverse impact on DHBs meeting people’s surgery needs, and DHBs set to cut spending further to avoid massive debt blowouts.
“Health insurance has provided timely access to surgery for the nearly 30% of New Zealanders who have it – with funded healthcare claims up nearly 10 percent in the past year,” Mr Styles said.
“Of course, with more claims funded, premiums are also up over the past year by around 8%, although there has been an increase in total lives covered – up by 20,000 over the 2018 year, or around one and a half percent.”
Despite concern over recent years around the affordability of sustained premium increases, particularly for older New Zealanders, health insurance coverage for those aged 65 and over remained at around 22% of the population.
Mr Styles said HFANZ had some tips for those looking to mitigate the impact of rising premiums.
“Opting for a higher excess is the most common. This effectively means self-insuring a portion of potential treatment costs and covering smaller medical bills out of pocket, but having health insurance for the big things if needed. Most insurers offer excesses of $2000–$4000 in return for a lower monthly premium.”
Choosing major medical rather than comprehensive insurance would also reduce annual premiums, he said. This was now the most common policy with around two-thirds of those insured.
Mr Styles said it made sense for people to simply talk with their insurer about what options might be available to limit or even reduce premium increases.
The latest HFANZ statistics showed the number of lives covered was up by 2100 for the December 2018 quarter, bringing the total number of New Zealanders with health insurance to 1.403 million.
Claims paid in the December quarter was up 11.9% to $346 million on the same period in 2017, while annual claims paid for calendar 2018 totalled $1.3 billion, up $115 million or 9.7%.
Premium income for the quarter was up $12 million or 3.2% on the September 2018 quarter to $403 million. Annually, premium income rose $119 million or 8.3% to $1.55 billion.
 
 

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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: DHBs accuse junior doctors union of misleading claims

District health boards are accusing the junior doctors’ union of making misleading and or deceptive statements in their deepening pay row. The doctors are taking ongoing strike action at public hospitals in a bitter row over proposed changes to their employment contract. DHBs say inaccurate union statements are fueling the dispute, and it’s calling for urgent intervention from the Employment Relations Authority. RNZ health correspondent, Karen Brown.

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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Junior doctors strike as dispute continues

Junior doctors are on strike again this morning for two days as tension mounts in public hospitals from strikes. The strike from 8am Tuesday until early Thursday is the third such strike by the doctors since mid January. The doctors are also planning a fourth two-day strike in two weeks’ time. Health correspondent Karen Brown talks through the details with Guyon Espiner.

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