Tuesday, 28 October 2008

First New Framing




More health frustrations

We have been experiencing some challenges with the NZ health system. Capital and Coast Health is our health provider... or should I say they are meant to be... providing a service seems to be a little beyond them currently.

The story goes like this...

We were seen by the head pediatrician at the hospital for Katya's hearing. He has some concerns about whether her deafness is due to a skull abnormality. He admitted Katya into the pediatric clinic program at the hospital so that the services she needs would be co-ordinated. He booked us in to see him just before Christmas and sent various appointment requests to various hospital units for various things.

The key request is for a CT scan. Everything else follows the outcome of this scan. You would think that this would be the first appointment we got? Apparently not.

We now have all the other services requested supplying appointments that we can not use because the Radiology department can not understand its link in the chain. We keep getting told 3-4 months even though the Pediatric department has told them twice now that the scan must be complete before Christmas.

What is frustrating is that I can see this is going to only get resolved when the head pediatrician wanders over to Radiology and cracks some heads together. Which is a colossal waste of resource. A good administrative person would be able to make these things flow but it seems like such people are few and far between in the health system.

This lack of basic administrative competence is starting to fuel my desire to get back involved in politics. Fortunately this will probably die away before it is a good time to jump in within the election cycle.

What won't die away is the fatherly instinct which will result in me applying some of my hard earned bureaucrat management skills to "manage" this situation to the conclusion that we need. This may be a bit of a bruising journey for some of our less than cooperative and competent hospital staff members.

Wednesday, 15 October 2008

The building starts

We have finally started (with the help of Mark and Don) the new stairs