There is an interesting difference in emphasis in the policies on hospital services. Labour’s is again very broad-stroked with no costing and emphasizes ”A Strong and Safe Public Health System You Can Trust“. National’s is very focused on waiting lists and Hospice, although it does discuss other aspects of DHBs. The preambles of both documents are eerily similar, with [...]

I see the business Roundtable and friends have produced a report saying health productivity has fallen. 
Despite recent huge increases in health spending, patients are not getting better care, the report says. The overall productivity of personnel in public hospitals decreased 8% between 2001 and 2006, while the productivity of medical staff dropped 15%.
I have some [...]

Here is the head-to-head comparison between Labour’s Woman’s Health Policy and National’s Maternity Policy. National’s policy is not a comprehensive woman’s policy and concentrates solely on birthing. However Labour’s policy offers only some waffle on access to contraception (nothing new here) and talks about its HPV (Gardasil) vaccination program which I have already commented on [...]

Here is the head-to-head comparison between Labour’s Health Workforce Policy and National’s (PDF). 
Labour’s policy starts off by patting itself on the back about the extra thousand doctors it has added to the workforce. I have already pointed out that this “growth” in doctors is less than the population growth and the number of doctors per [...]

The Herald today has this cute little graphic claiming that National is now out-pledging Labour.

 It was a relatively quiet campaign week in terms of spending promises, with Labour deciding to largely pull the plug on pledges other than infrastructure-related ones.
This would have been nice if it was true. Unfortunately, all it really appears to mean is [...]

Just a few hours after I posted about Labour’s total lack of a health policy – KAZAAM! – a health policy magically appeared on the Labour08 site. I’m sure it was a coincidence…
I was going to get stuck into an item by item comparison between the National and the Labour policies, but the [...]

It is now less than two weeks out from the election and Labour still has no health policy. Their website has nothing but feel-good blurb on the health page. I was hoping to do a head-to-head comparison but so far all I can say is National has a health policy and Labour has waffle…
In the interests of [...]

In the Sunday Star Times today, early childcare expert, Dr Sarah Farquhar, says that traditional kindergartens are dying, as kindies are switching to longer session times to pick up more funding. This is, of course, an inevitable consequence of the 20 hours “free” early childhood education (ECE) and another great illustration of how good intentions often [...]

Just apropos what I was saying about facial expressions in my post Soulless Savagery, I found these two photographs interesting. The first is of Liam Reid, the man accused of murdering Emma Agnew:
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A further six people have been arrested over the tainted SanLu milk scandal. The Chinese are still telling us that only four children have died (despite the fact that we know it’s at least five). There are 3654 children who are still sick and three are “serious” – whatever that means in Chinese government terms.
It [...]