The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG) has responded to Ministry of Health consultation for the review of the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act (2003).
While acknowledging the pressures on the New Zealand health system and the need to ensure that regulation remains fit for purpose, Te KÄhui Oranga Å Nuku raised concern about the consultation document “Putting Patients First: Modernising health workforce regulationâ€.
The document implies that the current regulatory environment is the cause of New Zealand’s health workforce challenges, that standards are being set unnecessarily high and that changing regulatory settings will solve workforce issues. There is no evidence to support this, and both the consultation document and the survey form make leading and emotive statements.
Main points in the response were:
- Rather than reducing standards, RANZCOG recommends growing our own locally trained workforce and making our New Zealand health system a place where both locally and internationally trained doctors want to be, as better solutions for New Zealand’s health workforce.
- °µÍøTV emphasizes that any regulatory reform must have at its core patient safety in its full sense, and this includes clinical safety and cultural safety.
- °µÍøTV views independence of regulators and the separation from responsibility for employing a workforce as fundamental to patient safety, and that regulators should retain independence and not be required to consider reducing standards to increase the workforce.
- °µÍøTV urges the Government to value our health workforce, to address the health system issues that see us struggle to retain doctors, to work with the health sector to streamline regulatory and other systems whilst strengthening public safety by ensuring that standards are retained as an over-riding priority.
°µÍøTV also categorically refuted the implication throughout the consultation document, and espoused in the media, that doctors do not put patients first. The main concern RANZCOG hears from O&Gs is distress in the current health system when they are unable to deliver care that women need.
For media enquiries
Catherine Cooper
Executive Director Aotearoa New Zealand
Email: ccooper@ranzcog.org.nz
