Simeon Brown responds to concerns over health care system
The health system has been under significant pressure this winter, with Auckland City Hospital saying it’s been worse than expected.
On Tuesday, Tauranga Hospital emergency department (ED) staff declared a ‘state of emergency’, saying the ED was running up to 200 percent capacity without the staffing needed.
In July, ED staff at North Shore Hospital said they faced chronic understaffing with some patients waiting 50 hours.
Elective surgeries have also been postponed as winter illnesses surge.
In July, Christchurch Hospital ED’s Dr Dominic Fleisher said a few minutes would be acceptable, but “patients are there for hours overnight”. In August, St John’s director of ambulance operations Doug Gallagher told us they were getting a call every 20 seconds, which was not sustainable.
“No doubt it’s been a very challenging winter,” Health Minister Simeon Brown told Morning Report on Wednesday. “In fact, it’s been, I think, one of the worst influenza seasons in a very long time with very high levels entering our hospital system, and so it has put the system under significant pressure this winter and our frontline staff have been working incredibly hard to respond to that.”
Brown said the coalition reintroduced targets scrapped by the previous government so it could be held accountable, claiming “year-on-year improvement as we work towards our 2030 health targets after years of decline”.
Labour ditched the targets in 2018, saying they created perverse incentives.
The proportion of people being admitted, discharged or transferred from EDs within six hours was at 68 percent at the end of 2023, and had improved slightly – but about a quarter of people were still waiting longer than that, some several times longer than the six-hour target. The proportion was virtually unchanged from 12 months ago, the data showed, and as low as 57 percent in some regions.
The government’s target is 95 percent nationwide by 2030.
“What I expect as minister of health is we want to see year-on-year improvement against all of our health targets, which is what we are seeing. We acknowledge there’s too many people waiting too long.”
Asked about short-staffing in EDs, Brown said recruitment was “happening up and down the country all of the time”, saying the previous government’s changes to the health system slowed decision-making processes down.
“We’re now devolving that decision-making back down to districts and regions, so that those decisions can be made much faster. Now, that change is in process that is happening, but ultimately that context is important because it tells us where we were and where we’re going.”
Data showed only 54 new FTE nurses were employed by Health NZ in the two years from March 2024 to March 2026.
Asked if the lack of recruitment was down to orders to Health NZ to save money, Brown said he “never made that instruction”.
“We put record funding into healthcare in every single Budget. We put more funding into our healthcare system and we continue to do so because ultimately we want to meet those health targets and we want to see people being seen faster and we want to see wait times reduced.”
In 2025 Brown instructed hospitals and public health services across the country to find more than half-a-billion dollars in “efficiencies” to re-invest in patient care.
And in August, documents released under the Official Infomation Act showed strict recruitment rules had been in place throughout 2024/25, which a union described as showing “the health minister was aware that our health system was not filling hospital vacancies as part of a deliberate savings plan and that patient care has suffered as a result”.
And recent data showed fewer than a quarter of adults have received the flu vaccine this year, similar to recent years – and targets for over-65s were not being met, dropping over the last few years, experts citing cost and post-Covid hesitancy.
The government did not extend the free flu vaccine to under-fives until 1 September, after the August peak in cases. Brown said that was a decision for Pharmac and Health NZ to make.
“As soon as Pharmac made that decision, we acted to bring that forward to this winter.”