“Auckland Bed Crisis Highlights Poor Planning And Funding”

“The crisis of too few beds in Auckland’s public hospitals to cope with emergency admissions and forcing patients into corridors highlights serious planning and funding failures of successive governments,” said Mr Ian Powell, Executive Director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, today.

“The former government failed throughout the 1990s to plan ahead to meet the needs of expected emergency admissions because it was besotted with a foolish ideology that so-called market forces would somehow sort things out. Meanwhile the current government has been poorly advised over what was needed to fund public hospitals in order to cope with emergency admissions.”

“The government should learn from this unfortunate debacle and start work now investigating what are the future pressures of emergency patient admissions likely to be so that it can better estimate what funding levels are necessary,” concluded Mr Powell.

Ian Powell

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

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