While the new system initially struggled with demand, she said performance had improved significantly.<\/p>\n
“Our response time now, if you ring our point of access, is three minutes to access our adult services and two minutes to access our children’s services,” she said.<\/p>\n
She rejected suggestions HCRG was failing to deliver care.<\/p>\n
“Patient safety and quality of care remains our absolute priority,” she said.<\/p>\n
She said decisions about treatment and visit schedules were made by healthcare professionals based on individual care plans and clinical need.<\/p>\n
Asked about claims the company was prioritising profits over care, Scrase said HCRG’s performance was monitored by the NHS through quality, safety and financial measures.<\/p>\n
“I can absolutely reiterate that my decisions are made on patient safety and quality. I have never had to make a decision based on profit,” she said.<\/p>\n
She added HCRG was regulated by the Care Quality Commission and had received “good” or “outstanding” ratings in inspections since the contract began.<\/p>\n
Responding to concerns about staff leaving, Scrase said workforce data did not support that view.<\/p>\n
“We are very proud of the staff that we’ve got and the care that they deliver, and that is not evidenced that we are losing our staff,” she said.<\/p>\n
Mathew said he would continue to scrutinise performance closely.<\/p>\n
“If we haven’t seen improvements, then we’re going to have to raise it up a level because we’re talking about the healthcare of the people of the area and it’s just not acceptable as it is.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While the new system initially struggled with demand, she said performance had improved significantly. “Our response time now,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[134,527,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-597379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}