Pacific Waves for 8 May 2025
Analysis on Sols PM leadership challenge; Study in Tuvalu's waters assesses ocean health; Fisheries management discussed at SPC meeting; Pacific women face barriers from accessing retirement benefits.
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RNZ News
9 hours ago
- RNZ News
The pluses and minuses in 12 month prescriptions
From next year, patients will be able to get prescriptions covering 12 months, rather than the current three. Announcing the move, the Health Minister Simeon Brown said it would put money in patient's pockets as they wouldn't have to pay for long term medications four times a year, and reduce GPs' paperwork. But GPs have raised concerns that patient safety could be at risk and that recommendations to extend the prescribing period to six months were ignored. Pharmacists say there will be benefits for some patients, but also funding implications, an increased chance of wastage and misunderstandings over those medicines not included, such as controlled drugs. Kathryn's joined by Luke Bradford the Medical Director of the Royal College of New Zealand GPs and Andrew Gaudin the chief executive of the Pharmacy Guild. Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
RNZ News
a day ago
- RNZ News
NZ's goal to get smoking rates under 5 percent this year – why that's highly unlikely
By By Janet Hoek and Jude Ball* of More than 80,000 people would need to quit smoking this year to bring Aotearoa's overall smoking prevalence under 5 percent. Photo: Next week is "scrutiny week" in Parliament - one of two weeks each year when opposition MPs can hold ministers accountable for their actions, or lack thereof. For us, it's a good time to take stock of whether New Zealand is on track to achieve its smokefree goal of reducing smoking prevalence to under 5 percent and as close to zero as possible, among all population groups, this year. The latest New Zealand Health Survey shows that, for the first time in a decade, smoking rates have flatlined rather than fallen. Stark inequities persist, with daily smoking prevalence among Māori at 14.7 percent (compared to 6.1 percent among European New Zealanders). To bring New Zealand's overall smoking prevalence under 5 percent would require more than 80,000 people to quit this year. Achieving the goal equitably means more than 60,000 of those people would need to be Māori. The government's repeal of earlier measures predicted to bring rapid and equitable reductions in smoking prevalence means achieving the Smokefree 2025 goal for all population groups is now highly unlikely. Proposed by the Māori Affairs Select Committee and adopted by the then National-led government in 2011, the Smokefree 2025 goal has always had equity at its heart. At that time, smoking prevalence among Māori was 37.7 percent and 14.7 percent among European New Zealanders. Reducing smoking rates to less than 5 percent for all population groups offered an opportunity to profoundly reduce health inequities burdening Māori. Early discussions recognised the large inequities in smoking rates. Speaking about his role in the select committee inquiry, former National Party leader Simon Bridges stated: The picture I had of smoking was quite wrong. Most of the time, smoking is not this idea of a free market with adults who freely consent to take up smoking but the more complex, difficult situation of children smoking as a result of parents and grandparents who smoked . That means that a more intense, stronger, more interventionist approach is called for. The first Smokefree Action Plan, only introduced a decade later in late 2021, included more intense measures and established a Māori and Pacific oversight committee to ensure all actions taken promoted equity. The action plan introduced three key initiatives: denicotinisation, a large reduction in outlets selling tobacco, and the smokefree generation strategy. All were expected to have strong pro-equity outcomes. Modelling predicted denicotinisation would bring unprecedented reductions in smoking prevalence, eliminating the gaps between Māori and non-Māori. Reducing tobacco availability would end the widespread access to tobacco in lower-income communities. The smokefree generation, a longer-term endgame strategy that would have meant anyone born after 2009 could no longer buy tobacco, was predicted to significantly reduce inequity, given the younger Māori (and Pacific) population structure. Then Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall noted: While smoking rates are heading in the right direction, we need to do more, faster, to reach our goal. If nothing changes, it would be decades till Māori smoking rates fall below 5 percent, and this government is not prepared to leave people behind. The coalition government's repeal of these measures in early 2024 left a void, but Associate Health Minister Casey Costello reaffirmed a commitment to the Smokefree 2025 goal. A January 2024 update to Cabinet stated: The government remains committed to further reducing smoking rates and achieving the Smokefree 2025 goal of daily smoking prevalence of less than 5 percent for all population groups. However, by late 2024 the narrative began changing. In November, Costello launched a new smokefree action plan in a final push to reach the headline 5 percent target. Her plan does not emphasise the structural changes (such as fewer outlets selling tobacco) called for by the Māori Affairs Select Committee. Instead, it relies on health promotion programmes to reduce smoking uptake and on increasing attempts to quit by "reinvigorating" stop-smoking messages and improving referral rates to support. We argue New Zealand will likely fall well short of its 2025 goal to bring smoking rates below 5 percent and reduce inequities, despite an ongoing commitment by Health New Zealand-Te Whatu Ora. During scrutiny week, we hope Associate Health Minister Costello will be asked how she explains the discrepancy between her earlier commitment to achieving the Smokefree 2025 goal among all population groups and more recent comments which appear to roll back the equity goal. More importantly, we hope questions will probe how she plans to reduce smoking prevalence among Māori to a third of its current level, and what evidence she has that the steps she proposes will work. * Janet Hoek receives funding from the Health Research Council of New Zealand, the Marsden Fund, NZ Cancer Society and NZ Heart Foundation. She is a member of the Health Coalition Aotearoa's smokefree expert advisory group and of the Ministry of Health's smokefree advisory group, a member of the HRC's Public Health Research Committee, and a Senior Editor at Tobacco Control (honorarium paid). She serves on several other government, NGO and community advisory groups. Jude Ball receives funding from the Health Research Council of New Zealand, the Marsden Fund, NZ Cancer Society, NIB Foundation, and the Health Promotion Agency. She is affiliated with the Public Health Association of New Zealand, a member of Health Coalition Aotearoa's smokefree advisory group, and serves on other NGO and community advisory groups. - This story originally appeared on The Conversation.
Scoop
a day ago
- Scoop
Health Reforms Raise Fears Of Two-Tier System And Workforce Shortages
Moves by Health NZ to outsource elective operations to the private hospital sector increase the risk of a two-tier health system and will worsen the medical workforce shortage, a leading medical college has warned. The Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) is one of the largest specialist medical colleges in Australia and New Zealand and the region's leading authority on anaesthesia, pain medicine and perioperative medicine. Dr Graham Roper, chair of ANZCA's New Zealand National Committee, says the outsourcing plans will negatively affect the training of anaesthetists, who are critical for operations to proceed, and see existing specialists move from public hospitals to the private sector. 'Trainees' practical experience will be impacted, with a loss of exposure to outsourced clinical cases, and skewed amounts of urgent and complex work. It will take longer for trainees to get their required experience, delaying their entry into the workforce. Anaesthesia training will become less desirable, threatening the ability to produce much-needed specialists. 'Anaesthetists are a central part of both the hospital and the surgical team – without them, operations simply can't go ahead.' Dr Roper says the changes will lead to public system specialists facing a large amount of complex and urgent patients, requiring the highest level of care with extended hours of work. This would lead to specialists choosing to move to the private sector, further increasing the strain on the public system. He is also questioning the ability of some private facilities to provide the required level of care and training opportunities. 'Not all private facilities are set up to deliver the same level of clinical care as the public system. Private providers do not take on the same complexity of work in the same volumes as the public system, and may not provide high-dependency care, intensive care, acute pain services, pre-admission clinics and access to urgent investigations. Any significant complications during or after surgery will see the patient transferred to the public system for ongoing care. 'Many private facilities do not have on-site medical cover overnight and have a limited ability to respond to medical emergencies,' Dr Roper says. 'Our Māori and Pacific peoples, with increased complexity of health needs, are unlikely to benefit from this outsourcing model. In addition, our rural and remote communities may not be well served with this change. 'People living in rural areas are not always close to a private provider, can have transport difficulties, and lose family and whānau support if they have to travel long distances for surgery.' Dr Roper says ANZCA is willing to be involved in finding solutions to the unmet need of elective surgery across Aotearoa New Zealand. 'The provision of high-quality safe and equitable care for our community remains the core aim of our profession and the New Zealand public should expect that access to anaesthesia and surgery is future-proofed.'
