Alliance says more front line health staff needed, not more talk

The Alliance Party says that more money should be spent on getting more health staff in the health system, rather than on revamping failed committees. Alliance Health Spokesperson Tom Dowie says the money that is to be put into propping up the Quality Improvement Committee should be put into extra health staff on the front line.

"This would be the only way to ensure that we don't have a repeat of the disgraceful situations like almost 20,000 'adverse events' around prescribing medicines in hospitals last year", he says. Mr Dowie says the time for talk by the Minister of Health is over. "It is clear the way to stop these shocking situations is to have more personnel physically checking prescriptions and ensuring that they are correct."

Mr Dowie says that if more health staff were put in at the coal-face, there would not be the need to work on improving error reporting, as there would be less errors. The Alliance says the health system is underfunded and to get the funding the Alliance would introduce a dedicated health levy as part of the tax system.

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