Misinformation from the Government

Radio NZ reports:

National and a nursing union boss are questioning the accuracy of official health figures about emergency department (ED) wait times, saying they cannot be real – and could lead to vital funding being misdirected.

A regional breakdown of monthly ED wait times shows many areas last year lagged well behind the historic target of 95 percent of people being seen within six hours.

This was consistent throughout 2022, before Northland, Southern and Taranaki EDs reported near-perfect figures in November and December.

National’s health spokesperson Shane Reti says he has never seen a figure like Northland’s – 99.7 percent – and believed it was a mistake.

The official Government data says Northland went from 76% to 99% in just one month.

According to the data, the West Coast normally has between 680 and 1000 people attend an ED each month – except for May, when only 92 supposedly showed up, ballooning to more than 8000 in both November and December.

So obviously incorrect, but still published by the Government as official data, All those hundreds of comms staff, and none of them check the data!

In Northland, between January and October, EDs saw between 4500 and 5000 patients – then in November and December, that apparently dropped to 361 and 318 respectively.

Counties Manukau, Southern and Waitemata also saw enormous drops in recorded attendance in the last two months of 2022, while Wairarapa’s figures increased nearly 10-fold.

Note that this incorrect data all happened after they abolished the DHBs.

Health Minister Ayesha Verrall used the Northland figures earlier this week to suggest there had been a large improvement in the region’s ED response times.

So the Minister went out there and used patently incorrect data, which got picked up by local media. And this Government lectures us on misinformation!

Te Whatu Ora national medical director Pete Watson said the figures were “as accurate as we’ve got them at the moment”, but “clearly [are] not accurate”.

I thought accuracy was binary.

Rather than improving, as Verrall said suggested was happening in Northland, Watson said nationwide, the situation was deteriorating.

“We’re not improving, so the system is under real pressure and we know that and that’s across the system, and we’re focusing on what we can do to address that.”

The nationwide figure showed a six-hour response performance trending downwards over the course of 2022, from 78.8 percent in January to between 71 and 72 percent from August onwards.

This fiasco really undermines confidence in Government statistics. I have a suggestion.

Stats NZ is highly respected. Why not have them put in charge of producing statistics for the health system, as it is obvious Health NZ is not able to do so accurately?