It seems that the Ministry of Health is now concerned that women may get the wrong message and think that they no longer need regular cervical smears after they have had the cervical cancer vaccine, Gardasil. The MacDoctor wishes to point out that he made this exact point nearly two years ago. He wonders how [...]

I see Labour is bellyaching about the proposed new National Health Board again. Labour’s health spokeswoman, Ruth Dyson, said Mr Ryall had already make up his mind about the future direction of health services. “This is more about Mr Ryall trying to impose his own vision for health than about a genuine attempt to make [...]

No, not the Dire Straits song, the strange request for extra government funding by the pharmacists for extra services to clients.  Pharmacy Guild chief executive Annabel Young said pharmacists wanted to be given the right to help patients in managing chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and asthma through health counselling and guidance on prescribed medicine [...]

I saw a patient from flight NZ1 at 4pm today. She was complaining of mild sore throat and runny nose which she thought initially was due to the aircraft air conditioning. She heard the news about the swine flu and so rang Healthline who, like the clueless people they usually are, immediately sent them to [...]

Hey, Bill! Still looking for government departments to slash? Here’s one – the health select committee. Any committee in the health sector that is concerned about toilet paper and pen usage instead of the provision of health does not deserve to live. Kill it now, Bill. Or get Tony to do it.  You know you want [...]

We are still a very long way from having countrywide-accessible patient records on computer. Several DHBs are slowly making inroads on the exchange of this information, but it really needs a strong government initiative. Unfortunately, it appears that the Ministry of Health is too concerned with irrelevancies at the moment, as this quote reveals: Doctors may [...]

John Key has asked all of his ministers to clamp down on elaborate, unnecessary conferences. This is not so much an ideological repudiation of the value of conferences, as an acknowledgement of difficult economic circumstances and a reaction away from Labour’s tendency to have multiple talkfests. The latest victim of this policy is a conference [...]

It is the basic instinct of people who have suffered the loss of a loved one to want to blame someone for the loss. This inclination is particularly prevalent in medicine, where the consequences of a simple mistake can be fataL Consequently, I have often seen erroneous conclusions such as this one. “We always knew it [...]

Campbell live had a story tonight about Rose, a 2-year-old, deaf girl who had a cochlear implant done in America but subsequently moved to New Zealand. Initially, the Ministry of Health refused to fund her speech and language therapy, thereby rendering the entire cochlea implant an expensive waste of time. After much lobbying, the Ministry [...]

Since I often rabbit on about inadequate funding and the government steadfastly sticks to the line that it is spending stacks more, I thought we should take a little look at Vote Health – the budget this year for health. Now, I should point out straight away, that this is a high level document that [...]