Health Minister Shane Reti. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Health Minister Shane Reti says he has been assured services are safe at Rotorua's emergency department after a patient died there while waiting for help last month.
Distressed staff have told RNZ the patient should have been seen within an hour, but the department was critically short-staffed. Just two weeks earlier, ED staff had written to management, raising alarm over excessive wait times.
Speaking to reporters at Parliament, Reti said he was sorry to hear of the "very unfortunate episode" but would not comment on whether it showed a system in crisis.
"In an emergency department, you see emergencies. That's its purpose. And so the internal report will look at what happened, how that came to be."
Reti said he had sought and received assurances from Health New Zealand that services, staff, and outcomes at Rotorua ED were safe.
Rotorua Hospital. Photo: Felix Desmarais/LDR
He acknowledged that EDs across the country were under stress but said Rotorua had one of the highest performing departments.
"It's in the top five for its shortest stays in emergency departments ... I am encouraged by that."
Asked about measures being taken to address staff shortages, Reti said some "very high quality telehealth providers" were providing specialist ED services "as needed" at a range of hospitals.
Reti said the government was also reviewing after-hours medical services with a report due back before year's end.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told reporters the government was working incredibly hard to fix the "broken healthcare system" it had inherited.
"We are doing everything we can. We've got a commissioner in there now because we know we need a better performance from that organisation."
Luxon said the government had made lowering ED wait times a top priority and was focused on growing the workforce.
The coalition has set a target that 95 percent of patients be admitted, discharged or transferred from an emergency department within six hours.
Both Reti and Luxon expressed condolences to the family of the patient who died.
Labour health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Labour not reassured by government response
Labour health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall said her heart went out to the patient's loved ones, as well as the staff involved.
"All deaths in hospital are a tremendous tragedy," she said.
"It's always hard to have a death of someone in your care, and then also to know in this particularly tragic situation that they had raised concerns about understaffing in their department already."
Verrall would not lay blame for the incident while the facts were still under investigation, but she said she was aware of thousands of safety risks around the country.
Reti's statements did little to reassure her the situation was under control, she said.
"Going one by one, where there's been a tragedy, and asking for things to get better is not the right approach," she said.
"We deserve visibility on where those risks lie and how the government is addressing them or making them worse through their own cost-cutting."
Verrall said the government was not doing enough to address staff shortages system-wide.
"There are instances where staff have raised concerns about what's happening in their department and have put in business cases to say that they need extra staff, and those have been turned down or not acted on."
