When the last of the autumn skies shine blue the way they did this year, it takes me right back to Coronary Care.
20th of May I got wheeled in there. I spent the first night looking out the window at the lights of Whangarei and in particular the traffic lights right below — green yellow red green yellow red, over and over — determined to keep my eyes open lest I dropped off to sleep and never woke again.
I woke to a beautiful sunrise and for the next couple of weeks, that was my view: a window up high looking out across the city to day after day of beautiful blue skies. The staff were all kindness and care and full of explanation of what had happened to me, except for why it might have happened.
That was 39 years ago. Talk about grateful.
That was 39 years ago. We were in the middle of Rogernomics. I didn’t really know but I sort of suspected that thanks to the reforms we’d been seeing there was a big, big bill waiting for me. Very relieved to discover otherwise. Talk about grateful.
I have all the notes they compiled during and after my stay. I gave them to the cardiologist last year. This is really great documentation, he said, suggesting it’s more than you’ll likely get these days.
Four decades on, Coronary care is greatly assisted by state of the art equipment that can see up down around and inside my heart and the pipes that feed it in vivid pulsating colour. It was able to reassure and guide me greatly.
Four decades on, health care is not assisted at all by the sort of politician who is all shortcut and lazy fix and empty promise.
How do you keep on providing properly for everyone? Easy: You tax at a decent level, and you tax wealth not just income. This should be so bleeding obvious it would be beyond all debate. But no, they utterly fetishise lowering the tax burden and here we are waiting and waiting for wards and hospitals that are promised but never come.
Okay, now let’s go back to Whangarei for some more detailed patient notes.
This is really great documentation, I said to myself, as I read Gary Payinda’s account of what Whangarei Hospital has been waiting for.
The background story on our 1950s-era Whangarei hospital is that our region outgrew it literally decades ago. I know because I have worked there for 19 years as an emergency doctor in its emergency department (though it should be noted I am speaking on my own behalf, and as the Labour candidate for Whangarei). Whangarei has grown like crazy over the last 40 years, but the hospital (already past it’s use-by date even in 2007 when I moved to Whangarei), hasn’t kept up. Its population has grown like gangbusters, but its public services and public infrastructure has not kept up.
Labour paid for the first half of the hospital rebuild by 2022, not just announcing but actually funding the $759 million dollar cost of the first half of the hospital rebuild. It was supposed to cost $572M but by the time it was funded, inflation has shot the cost up to $759M. Labour funded Stage 1 of our hospital rebuild in 2022.
Stage 1 of the rebuild will be the ED, ICU, CCU, operating theatres, radiology—the ‘acute services building’. Plus 12 child health centre clinic rooms, car parks, a whanau house. The acute services building hasn’t yet been built, but the smaller projects have been started. That brings us up to today. Still awaiting the Stage 1 Acute Services building by the end of 2031, we are told. Six years from now for the first half of the rebuild to go live.
As we have all noticed, inflation has been a big problem for the past several years. And while consumer inflation has been bad, inflation in the cost of healthcare and healthcare building costs have been much worse. By some estimates, 20-40% increases. The price of healthcare and infrastructure building is increasing virtually before our eyes. In 2022 the cost of the first half of the hospital rebuild was $572M. In just four years it that had already grown by 33%.
The Ghost Hospital of North Shore. Do you remember hearing about the Totara Haumaru ward build at the North Shore hospital? It was also 150 beds, like our Whangarei ward tower (but with an additional 8 operating theatres). It cost $317 million at the time, and funding was announced in 2018. Inflation has had a devastating rise on health building costs since then.
That’s why seeing the actual funding of our hospital is so important. The Ghost Hospital of North Shore was completed on time, but there was insufficient money dedicated to staffing it, so it remained empty for months. That’s why ‘announcing’ funding is not as important as showing evidence of a “signed, sealed, and delivered” package.
We don’t want a Ghost Hospital in Whangarei.
I think it deserves mention that the second half of the hospital rebuild has remained unfunded for these past 3 years. This govt has been in office since Nov 2023. In that time, there has been no funding of the Second Stage of the rebuild. It’s just been left hanging. It’s good that it’s an election year, and it’s good that people have kept the pressure on, leading to an announcement yesterday that it would be funded. But that doesn’t undo that fact that during this 3 year delay, costs have been going up.
During this 3 year delay, the National govt did fund many other things. They found approximately $219 million to aid tobacco sales, $2.9 Billion to assist property investors with mortgage interest deductions, and around $300 million to help oil companies (one of whom, BP, recently announded a yearly growth in profits of 132%), but it did not fund the Whangarei Hospital rebuild. All $759 million of that money was funded and approved by Labour, in 2022.
Then yesterday this Coalition govt announced that the Second Stage of the Hospital rebuild would go ahead. They would not delay or cancel it. That was wonderful news! But making an announcement that it would be built by 2032 is different than showing the people of Whangarei that it is fully funded.
So I will end by saying this to the govt of the day:
Thank you for funding the second half of our much needed Whangarei Hospital rebuild. Many lives will be saved as a result. (But can you please show us the proof, to set our mind at ease.)
The better and fuller the notes, the clearer and fuller the picture you get: it’s easy to make promises but that means nothing until you actually come up with the funding.
This is a government that’s happy to make the promises but way less keen do the spending. You cannot short-cut this. If you want a proper health system, you must spend properly and you must tax properly. That’s the plain fact of it.
