Remember Labour abolished the health targets

RNZ reports:

A Bay of Plenty woman who waited 16 hours with her elderly father to get treatment at Waikato Hospital says she was shocked to learn how overwhelmed the emergency department was.

The woman, who does not want to be identified, sought treatment for her father in January and waited in triage for hours to get help for what turned out to be a brain bleed.

She said he was fortunate enough to get a bed – many others were waiting on chairs for similar lengths of time.

In 2008 only 70% of ED patients were seen and processed within six hours.

National introduced a target of 95% of ED patients being seen within six hours and by 2014 they were at 94%.

Labour effectively abolished the health targets in 2017. They said they will consult on new targets, but three and a half years later they haven’t decided, so in the absence of meaningful targets you get worst results for patients. By September 2017 it had dropped to 84.8%. Next month we will get data for September and December 2020.

Same goes for cancer waiting times. National had 92.3% of cancer patients starting their first treatment within 62 days. Now the number is below 85%.