Despite Covid-19 being all but eliminated in our community and a handful of cases turning up at the border every day, New Zealand is still in the midst of a pandemic.

We still have a backlog of surgeries to attend to, we still must vaccinate our entire population and we still have a many of our health workforce working in MIQ facilities.

Our health system is still under a lot of pressure.

Which means the Government’s decision to restructure our health system now is incredibly strange.

This restructure would be a costly mistake at the best of times but doing it during a pandemic is madness.

We are already having challenges rolling out our critical Covid-19 vaccine, completely restructuring our health system is not going to help.

Labour’s restructure will see our regions and smaller communities lose their voice and their autonomy.

Our regions know what works for them when it comes to keeping their communities healthy, and that is not always having Wellington dictate terms to them.

Having Wellington bureaucrats make more decisions will not help local people get their operations.

We also do not support a separate Māori Health Authority as it runs the risk of a fragmented two-tier system. Creating a two-tiered funding system based on race is perverse.

As a Māori health practitioner of some 30 years, I desperately want Māori health to improve, but creating two systems is not the pathway.

Any treatment you receive should not depend on your ethnicity; it should be based on need.

More problems emerge when you look for the details. Because there are not any. We do not know how much this radical restructure will cost, but we know it will be high.

The millions of dollars that will be spent on creating more bureaucracy in Wellington should be going towards frontline services, cancer drugs, surgeries, and nurses.

The focus should also be on speeding up our vaccine rollout, which is still the second slowest in the OECD.

The Government should be looking to maintain regional identities and exploring the consolidation of some functions across DHBs, like asset management, rather than getting rid of them all.

We want to see better health outcomes for all New Zealanders. We want to see that those who need the most care is receiving it.

National knows our health system is struggling and there are definite inequities. We want New Zealand to have a world class health system that delivers for all.

A National Government would implement our Better Public Service targets again, which held the Government to account on how well different parts of our health system was doing.

We will retain the community and local voice through a DHB framework, not necessarily through DHBs themselves, we will repeal a separate Māori Health Authority and work towards a single, integrated health system that will deliver better for Māori.

We will focus on sensible outcomes that get New Zealanders across the country the healthcare they need.

But such a major restructure in the middle of a pandemic while undertaking three critical mass vaccinations, is reckless. Playing with the health system is playing with people’s lives. - Dr. Shane Reti, National party spokeperson for Health