Spam Journalism #44

Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article.

The question that puzzles me is why newspapers insist on printing everything directly from Labour party press releases? Do they have some sort of financial agreement with Labour? “Owen Glenn will pay you half a million a year if you print our balderdash directly without editing”. Nah -Labour doesn’t have the money. It’s probably just LAZY JOURNALISTS!

Ryall defends hospital cuts

“Thousands of patients will be affected by cutbacks to frontline hospital services dictated by the Government, Labour says.

“Health Minister Tony Ryall faced tough questioning in Parliament yesterday about plans to close wards at weekends and limit access to emergency departments at some health boards.”

Tell me that’s not directly from a Labour press release. Note that:

• National has made no reduction to the funding of DHBs and has, in fact, added an extra $750 million to Vote Health.
• These are not Ryall’s plans to cut frontline services but the DHB’s plans.
• This is in spite of Ryall explicitly saying that savings were NOT to be made from frontline services.
• This is the annual DHB whine about threatened services, in order to try and drum up some more funding for themselves. It is merely louder this year because most of the DHBs are still loaded with Labour’s proteges and it is a National government in power.

I mean look at the threatened services for goodness’ sake:

“Mid-Central: must cut $10 million from budget. Job losses are predicted.”

And why should any of these be frontline staff? Yet it is implied that these will be people delivering essential services. What utter nonsense. Do these people not see the endless bureaucracy where the money is being wasted?

MacDoctor advice to Tony Ryall – Fire entire board.

“Whanganui: closing wards at weekends to save on overtime wages.”

If Whanganui has this amount of spare space in its wards (which is very doubtful), then why are they not closing wards during the week? Or are they saying that they will be cutting out elective surgery on Thursdays and Fridays in order to ensure that the surgical wards are empty over the weekend? They will find it much easier to temporarily close beds in each ward, rather than entire wards. And this has been done in other hospitals for years, why are they only starting now?

MacDoctor advice to Tony Ryall – Fire entire board.

“Taranaki: preparing for hospital cutbacks.”

Oooooh, that’s so detailed! My head is spinning… After eight months of clear direction from National, they are not only still preparing, they are preparing for the wrong thing!

MacDoctor advice to Tony Ryall – Fire entire board.

“South Canterbury: reducing the number of patients seen in emergency departments by up to 5000 and axing up to 200 elective operations a year; cutting radiology services.”

Extraordinary. Apparently the South Canterbury lot are going to shoot every tenth person that arrives in the emergency department. AND they are going to axe elective surgery despite this being the exact opposite to the stated policy of the current government. AND they are going to Xray less, somehow. Note: I was Clinical director of a radiology service for 18 months. In that time, I came in 8% under budget and increased the available service by 20%. It was not difficult – I am no administrative genius – it just required a bit of thought and some reasonable personal skills.

MacDoctor advice to Tony Ryall – Fire entire board.

“Southland and Otago: cutting home support services to save $10m.”

Exactly what are they cutting? Anything essential? Doubt it. I worked in Invercargill hospital for years. There are easily dozens of places where you could shave off money and accumulate $10 million in saving, and no-one would ever notice. The Invercargill ED nurses shaved $11,000 off the ED laundry bill by not changing the linen on the examination couches, unless they were soiled or the patient had an infectious disease. It was that simple.

Not really enough information to execute the boards here, but the fact that they seem to be whining to the opposition gives me a very itchy trigger finger…

Final advice to Tony Ryall: Make each board give you a detailed list of the cuts they plan to make, and their justifications. Today. I’m betting none of them have got beyond the kite-flying stage. It should be easy to demonstrate that Labour is full of it and the Dominion Post is staffed by terminally lazy spammers.

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