Despite being awash with communications staff, the fledgling organisation struggles at almost every turn to tell it like it is.
At the beginning of last week HNZ was confident about the timeliness of its service to cancer patients, saying more than once that 90% of them in the southern district were being seen on time.
But by the end of the week, it had to back down and concede the figure was 72%.
Health NZ says its reference to 90% was to patients starting radiation treatment within required times after they had their first specialist appointments (FSAs) and not for those receiving other interventions such as surgery.
Nor did it refer to waits for FSAs.
The organisation was under the media spotlight because the deadline was looming for reporting on recommendations from the depressing report from Health and Disability Commissioner Morag McDowell in April into the provision of southern non-surgical cancer services between 2016 and 2022.
That found patient harm, not quantified, had been caused by capacity issues within the Southern Blood and Cancer Service and prolonged delays in patients receiving their FSAs.
Ms McDowell issued a raft of recommendations to HNZ Southern, its national office and Te Aho o Te Kahu Cancer Control Agency, requiring them to report progress last week.
But instead of properly planning for media coverage, HNZ inexplicably chose to paint a rosier picture than reality on waiting times, then nit-picked about what had been said trying to justify it, before apologising for the confusion.
Patient advocate Melissa Vining, whose concerns triggered the HDC report, also highlighted the fact letters sent to patients informing them about wait times had not improved as sought by the HDC, despite the HNZ saying it had met all critical elements of Ms McDowell’s review.
Mrs Vining was later told the southern district thought the letters had been changed but they had not.
We have lost track of how many times attention has been drawn to aspects of the southern district’s record keeping and communications by the HDC.
In 2021, we reported the then Southern District Health Board was considering ways to improve the content of their letters which were the subject of many complaints about communication.
If anything was done, it was clearly not good enough.
Scared and vulnerable people are affected by poor communication. Delays in cancer treatment can affect their long-term outcomes.
Fudginess about waiting times is not fair to them and does not help patients weigh up whether they might need to seek other treatment options.
Last week there was another report from the HDC into a 2019 case involving the former Southern DHB and the tardy reporting of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan for a woman in her 70s with metastatic disease, delaying her follow-up treatment.
In this case Ms McDowell found clinical documentation during the woman’s admission was inadequate, omitting important details regarding her care.
How hard is it to get such basic stuff right, particularly when told repeatedly about it?
The southern public is well aware of the issues around the shortage of radiation oncologists, and nobody expects addressing that to be easy in the face of a nationwide shortage in this field.
All the more reason for HNZ to be upfront about issues.
Gilding the lily just increases frustration with the health system and further diminishes confidence in it.
And another thing
It is good to see our newest public holiday Matariki being enthusiastically embraced in its second year.
The number of public celebrations of the beginning of the Māori New Year has increased, and it seems there have also been more informal family get togethers to share kai and memories this year.
As we said last year, it will take time for the new holiday to embed and for those not familiar with the occasion to develop their own ways of marking it, but we are well on the way.
