{"id":610571,"date":"2026-09-24T18:52:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T18:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/610571\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T18:52:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T18:52:11","slug":"dannevirke-residents-demand-accountability-over-state-of-healthcare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/610571\/","title":{"rendered":"Dannevirke residents demand accountability over state of healthcare"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dannevirke locals have echoed calls from other towns in the Tararua region<\/a> for a return to a local ownership model of healthcare.<\/p>\n

About 200 locals turned out to a meeting about the future of the Dannevirke Community Hospital on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Health New Zealand has put a temporary halt on the hospital taking new patients while it finds more clinical staff, following a number of resignations.<\/p>\n

The hospital and a number of medical centres in the region are owned by the Tararua Health Group<\/a>, which is in turn owned by OmniHealth – a network of about 17 practices around the country.<\/p>\n

OmniHealth has been contacted for comment.<\/p>\n

Retired sonographer Annie Poulton worked for Tararua Health Group for 23 and a half years.<\/p>\n

The culture at the hospital changed dramatically and staff morale declined during the time Omni were majority shareholders, she said.<\/p>\n

“They were holding these big team corporate meetings trying to boost staff morale, and I’d been away, and so many staff had left in that time. And I made a comment at the meeting, you know, ‘It feels like a block of Swiss cheese. There’s so many holes in this place now’. We’ve lost so much experience, so much knowledge, you know, really amazing people. And the comment was, ‘no one’s irreplaceable’.”<\/p>\n

Poulton said she wanted to see some accountability from Omni.<\/p>\n

“We’ll get through this and I think this is just what’s needed, actually. It had to come to a head and we’ll move forward from here, I think we will.<\/p>\n

“It’ll be a new, different look, hopefully it’ll still be Tararua Health Group, but it won’t be owned by Omni. It’ll be a community-based, whatever, a new entity, but not with a corporate leading it.”<\/p>\n

\"Tararua<\/p>\n

Tararua District Mayor Scott Gilmore.<\/p>\n

RNZ \/ Pokere Paewai<\/p>\n

Tania Chamberlain is chief operations officer at Ng\u0101ti Kahungunu ki Tamaki-nui-a-Rua, she oversees Te Kahu Hauora GP clinic and formerly worked at OmniHealth.<\/p>\n

Things had gotten so bad at the hospital that clinicians were sending patients to the emergency department instead, she said.<\/p>\n

“No clinician worth their salt and has got into health for that reason would ever choose to send an elderly patient to ED where the wait might be 27 hours when they could be safe and warm and cosy down the road at their own community hospital. But sadly, that’s how unsafe they felt that it is.”<\/p>\n

Representatives from both Health New Zealand and the Primary Health Organisation, which managed Omni’s contract, attended the meeting.<\/p>\n

Geoff Gwyn, the regional director planning, funding and outcomes for the central region at Health New Zealand told the crowd it had no plans to close the hospital.<\/p>\n

Health New Zealand was providing additional clinical workforce support at Dannevirke Community Hospital for the next 30 days and as a precautionary measure during that period, put a temporary pause on new admissions<\/a> to the hospital.<\/p>\n

“It’s clear that at the moment the services aren’t sustainable due to some staff resignations. So, we are bringing in additional Health NZ clinical staff in order to ensure the services remain available to the community,” he said.<\/p>\n

The health agency also carried out an audit of the hospital this week.<\/p>\n

“We’re taking this seriously. There was an audit done on the Tararua Community Hospital, a regular audit in June. I’ve listened to the community, I’ve listened to the concern of the clinicians, and that’s why the unannounced audit was done on Tuesday. I have to wait to see what that tells us before I can understand the next steps,” Gwyn said.<\/p>\n

\"Geoff<\/p>\n

Geoff Gwyn, the regional director planning, funding and outcomes for the central region at Health New Zealand.<\/p>\n

RNZ \/ Pokere Paewai<\/p>\n

Chamberlain said she was unsure if anything would change in the long term.<\/p>\n

“But I guess time will tell. I just hope that they don’t sort of think, well, all the meetings are gone and the pressure is off now and we can go back to doing what we’re doing. Something has to change.”<\/p>\n

Tararua District mayor Scott Gilmore said the turnout at all three community meetings showed just how important healthcare was to rural communities.<\/p>\n

“Rural healthcare absolutely is difficult, but that doesn’t mean we should accept not having a good safe service for people living in our areas.<\/p>\n

“It’s funded through public money, we need to make sure that one, our politicians understand what the needs are in our areas, but actually our healthcare is well managed here as well.”<\/p>\n

Gilmore said rural communities were great places to live, but they needed to ensure that rural healthcare services were also great places to work in order to attract doctors and nurses to the regions and retain them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dannevirke locals have echoed calls from other towns in the Tararua region for a return to a local…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610572,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-610571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610571","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=610571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}