Yesterday’s Herald contained a sad story about a young man who had been seen by the local mental health team, diagnosed him as potentially psychotic and prescribed an anti-psychotic. His counsellor later told him to stop taking the anti-psychotic and continue with counseling. He subsequently committed suicide. A young man committed suicide after his counsellor [...]

Ron Paterson, the former Health and Disability Commissioner, is going to head up a research project into “the best practice on how the public can be confident any given medical practitioner is “a good doctor”“. While this sounds superficially like a worthy undertaking, you can be assured that the conclusions arrived at will probably be [...]

The sad story of the death of diabetic Mrs. Maureen Pineki is the subject of an even sadder report released by the Auckland DHB today. The reason it is sad is because it comes to almost the entirely wrong conclusions about this poor lady’s death. The report urges: RECOMMENDATIONS LABTESTS: Review systems to ensure timely [...]

The NZ Nurses’ Organisation tells us that rest home neglect is “all too common”. While this is certainly true, I don’t accept their reasoning when it come to causes: “These two cases are a powerful illustration of the conflict between caring and profit.” No. These cases illustrate the problem of state funding of a private [...]

Well the Saturday Herald is splattered with so many hysterical articles about the evils of Labtests that it almost seems they have been bought out by DML. The articles range from the idiotic to the actually concerning (if true). There is the sad tale of the GP who wants to leave Auckland because Labtests is [...]

I don’t normally comment on the media versions of medical disasters, particularly when they have been filtered through the HDC, but the one in today’s Herald caught my eye. It is the tragic story of 2-year-old Reef Steiner, who died of asthma in Tauranga hospital. It has the rather dramatic title “Pleas for dying son [...]

Robyn Stent, the former Health and Disability Commissioner, adds an interesting twist to the tale of the IVF embryos in cold storage. Her tack is that Former Health Minister Annette King altered the wording of the HDC code of rights to allow something like this to happen. The change occurred to right 7(10): “Any body parts or bodily substances [...]

There was an ugly example of inexcusably lazy journalism in the Herald on Sunday, yesterday (not available online). In an article on homicidal mental health patients, in a sidebar on Mark Burton – the man who stabbed his mother to death shortly after discharge from Invercargill Mental Health unit – comes this horror: Dr Tom O’Flynn, [...]

My father had a retinal detachment of his left eye in the mid 1960s. An ophthalmologist (eye specialist) spot=welded the detaching margin with a laser and preserved most of my father’s sight. A patient mentioned in an HDC report released today was not so lucky and lost his eye. Three patients needing urgent treatment had serious [...]

An Item on 3 News about Psychwatch, a Name and Shame website complaining about lapses in the mental health system. The Mental Health services are understandably, and quite justifiably, annoyed. Mental Health Commission chairman Peter McGeorge said today that focusing attention on individuals who work within mental health teams was unfair and was unlikely to [...]