Morning Report Essentials for Tuesday 8 July 2025
In today's episode, Shayne Iti said his 15-year-old daughter Katie Margaret Iti died on Saturday in Hutt Hospital from complications of influenza B, the Royal Commission into the country's Covid-19 response has requested former prime minister Jacinda Ardern to appear for questioning, the government is considering placing a cap on how much local councils can increase rates, the second day of hearings on the proposed Regulatory Standards Bill will get underway at Parliament on Tuesday, and ongoing parking issues in Mount Maunganui - including being completely full at peak times - has led Tauranga City Council to try and find out-of-the-box solutions.
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Health NZ makes hundreds of millions in savings - but says more are needed
Health NZ is aiming to get the deficit down to $200m by the end of the 2025-26 financial year. Photo: RNZ Health NZ (HNZ) has reduced its deficit by hundreds of millions of dollars more than expected, but says more savings are needed to rein it in further. The deficit for the recently-ended financial year was expected to be $1.1 billion, about $650m less than last year's forecast. Health NZ's new statement of performance expectations for 2025-26 says there will be a "particular focus on improving internal productivity and ongoing tight control of costs". It would be "making better use of the overall capacity of the hospital and specialist services... as well as building partnerships with private hospitals", said the 55-page statement. The agency had been losing more than $140m every month late last year, before changes were made. The new aim was to get the deficit down to $200m by the end of the 2025-26 financial year. The government has put Lester Levy at the head of a newly reconstituted HNZ board , after saying he had delivered as commissioner on improving finances and services. Any new spending would be "tightly aligned to priorities", said the statement. It was signed off by Levy at the end of June, in one of his final acts as commissioner, a role created after the board was sacked amid budget blow-out and recriminations in mid-2024. The statement sets out what HNZ will do this year to deliver on its 2024-28 goals. "For this financial year, and the next, we will continue to implement a work programme that focuses on bringing our pathway back to budget, bedding in our regional structures and bringing in new ways of working," said the statement. Among the three key risks was delivering "healthcare outcomes whilst also delivering fiscal efficiencies". Another was workforce relations, capacity and personnel cost pressure. Handling the risks would require stabilising teams, bedding in an operating model focused on local delivery, "with clear decision-rights and accountabilities". It would also require "deepening partnerships with private sector providers where this presents good value". Most of the 2024-25 deficit was due to a $1.4 billion deficit in hospital and specialist services for that period. That was attributed to lower than budgeted appropriation revenue, "investments made to improve access to planned care" - contracting with private hospitals is being overhauled - and other cost pressures, such as gas prices going up. There were also surpluses in other areas, including $270m in primary and community care services. The statement showed the cost of outsourcing personnel is expected to drop from $430m last year to $260m, while outsourced service costs are forecast to rise by 25 percent to a billion dollars. One wildcard around personnel costs this year is paying back current and former staff for breaches of the Holidays Act over several years, which is expected to total about $1.5 billion. So far $522m has been paid back to 70,000 current staff. The rest - to some current staff, balance of interim payments and to all former staff registered with Health NZ - is expected to be all paid out by mid-2026. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
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Is there confusion over the role of 'physician associates'?
An investigation ordered by the UK government into physician associates there has found they shouldn't diagnose and treat untriaged patients. It also recommends changing their name to "assistant" rather than associate to stop them being confused with doctors. Four months ago the Health Minister, Simeon Brown, gave the go ahead for Physician Associates to become part of the regulated health workforce here. At the moment the PA's working here are trained in the UK or the US and work under the licence of a supervising doctor. The New Zealand Resident Doctors' Association has backed the two main findings of the UK report, but the New Zealand Physicians Associate Society says the situation in the UK isn't applicable here. Kathryn is joined by Deborah Powell the National Secretary of the Resident Doctors Association and Lisa deWolfe the regulation chair of the New Zealand Physician Associate Society. To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
RNZ News
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The famous Dunedin Study gets world-wide attention
The Dunedin Study. Photo: Dunedin Study/University of Otago The landmark Dunedin Study of babies born in the early 1970s has caught the eye of the OECD. The study followed the lives of 1037 babies babies born at Queen Mary Maternity Hospital, Dunedin, in 1972. The participants were assessed every two years, then as adults every five to seven years. Using over 52 years of data, the Dunedin researchers identified eight different pathways strongly linked to early factors like mental health, childhood trauma, and cognitive skills. The OECD plans to use these findings to help policymakers around the world understand how early life experiences shape futures that thrive or struggle. Dorothy Adams, an independent adviser who worked at the OECD on secondment from the NZ Ministry of Social Development, told Morning Report the collaboration was "incredibly valuable". While there are other overseas longitude study, with a couple done over a similar timeframe, the Dunedin Study is unique, partly due to its very high retention rate of about 90 percent. "The OECD, in their view, it [the Dunedin Study] is world leading in many regards," Adams said. She said a particularly interesting finding from the study was the role IQ plays throughout an individual's life. "Young ones found to have good, or high IQ were more likely to do better in life then those with low IQ," she said. She said IQ is amenable to intervention, and research findings are starting to be implemented in programmes. For example, the study found ages three to four were critical for development of self regulation - how you think, behave and feel. "The Dunedin Study didn't necessarily give the answer about what to do, but it really narrowed down the search," Adams said. In response, a programme called Engage was developed, a game that helps develop cognitive skills in children, and was implemented in about half of New Zealand's Early Childhood Education (ECE). "It's being measured, it's being monitored and we are seeing results," Adams said. "I think that is a really lovely example of how these research findings are starting to be used in intervention." She said researchers are starting to look at how the Dunedin Study could be used more for contemporary challenges and to guide intervention development.
