Macdoctor has a prescription for our ailing health system:
Processes become more important than people and we wonder why we are short of the very people that make the system work. That’s doctors, nurses and allied health professionals NOT managers. And there is only one way to keep them:
We need to make the New Zealand Health System a nice place to work.
Make it flexible. Make it friendly. Make it supportive. Make it financially and intellectually rewarding. Make it streamlined and facilitating. Make it empowering (in a non-managerial sense!) Stop treating your staff as units that fill gaps in rosters.
None of this is difficult. It probably doesn’t even need a whole load of extra money, just money spent in the right place (Note to Minister of Health – Access to surgery fluctuates wildly around the country. THIS MEANS THAT YOUR FUNDING FORMULA DOESN’T WORK). Excuse the shouting. (Stupid Turkeys)
To paraphrase an alcoholism advert – It’s not the funding, it’s how we’re funding…
That’s simple medicine really, but how do we get the minister, and the ministry of swallow it?