Health

A list of our content (including reports, articles, blog posts, and published letters) about the health sector or health topics.
Delivering scheduled services to patients

December 2013: This article summarises the progress that the Ministry of Health and district health boards have made in responding to the recommendations we made in 2011. Our 2011 report was about scheduled (or "elective") services (assessments and treatment)...

Regional services planning in the health sector

November 2013: This report looks at how well regional services planning is working in practice. The Ministry of Health and district health boards have put effort into creating the conditions for success, but regional services planning is not yet business as usual. Overall, we expected to see more tangible examples of services that were planned regionally rather than at a district level, and more evidence that the expected benefits were emerging ...

Evolving approach to combating child obesity

June 2013: We wanted to understand the public sector’s approach to combating child obesity, but the Ministry of Education and Sport New Zealand no longer focus on obesity to the extent they have in the past and the Ministry of Health was evaluating new ideas and approaches to combating obesity. These changing circumstances limited what my staff could usefully audit...

Home-based support services for older people

July 2011: We carried out a performance audit to establish how effective the Ministry of Health and district health boards are in ensuring that, where appropriate, people aged 65 and over (older people) get the care and support they need to remain living independently at home...

Progress in delivering publicly funded scheduled services to patients

June 2011: This report assesses progress made in achieving the government strategy "Reduced Waiting Times for Public Hospital Elective Services". There has been good progress over 10 years but there is more to do to ensure that patients are assessed in a nationally consistent way, and seen and treated in priority order...

Effectiveness of arrangements to check the standard of services provided by rest homes

December 2009: The Ministry is actively trying to address shortcomings in the effectiveness of rest home auditing and certification arrangements. However, more work remains to be done and it is still too early to tell whether the efforts to make the current arrangements work as intended will make a difference or whether certification is fundamentally unable to do what the legislation envisaged...

Allocation of the 2002-05 Health Funding Package

October 2006: We undertook this audit to provide Parliament with a better understanding of where the Health Funding Package had been allocated between 2002 and 2005. The Ministry of Health had good documentation to support decisions on allocating the package. However, it is not possible to say from this audit how the Health Funding Package was ultimately spent, because district health boards, and many Ministry directorates, did not keep separate records of Health Funding Package funds...

Pharmaceutical Management Agency: Changes to the frequency of medicine dispensing

May 2005: In October 2003, Pharmac changed the rules for dispensing medicines. It let doctors prescribe that a 90-day supply of certain medicines be dispensed all at once, rather than spread over 3 visits to the pharmacist. Pharmac projected that this could reduce district health boards’ spending on the dispensing fees paid to pharmacists by $132 million over 5 years. We decided to audit this because of the large savings projected, and the effects of the change on patients, doctors, and pharmacists...

Management of Hospital-acquired Infection

June 2003: The idea of patients acquiring an infection as a result of treatment they receive strikes at the core of the health system. The Ministry of Health and DHB staff have acknowledged our audit as providing a baseline from which to improve infection control practices...