Health Policy Summary

Go to the full Health Policy

Key Principles

• Health care must be publicly funded and be based on treating the whole person.
• Priority should be given to health promotion and prevention of illness and injury.
• Health should be valued as taonga.

Specific Policy Points

Public Health and Illness Prevention

• Increase funding to promote health and prevent illness and injury to 10% of the health budget.
• Introduce a free annual wellness check for all New Zealanders.
• Ensure the underlying factors of ill health, such as unemployment, poor housing, and poor nutrition are addressed.

Health Workforce

• Support improvements in the pay and working conditions of health professionals.
• Increase the number of positions for nurses in the health sector.
• Introduce lower tertiary fees and a student allowance for all students including those training for health professions.

Waiting Lists

• Increase funding for straightforward surgical services.
• Ensure all patients waiting for treatment are treated within internationally established timeframes.

Primary Health Care

• Expand free and low-cost healthcare services to low income families.
• Extend the healthcare subsidies available to superannuitants to cover people on sickness and invalid's benefits.
• Promote team-managed, home-based primary care for at-risk older people and people with impairments.

Complementary Health Care

• Establish a Complementary Health Care Unit within the Ministry of Health to facilitate the integration of selected complementary health practices and therapies into the public health system.
• Ensure New Zealand retains regulatory control of the dietary supplements industry.

Rural Health

• Increase funding to rural health services to recognise the greater range of skills required by rural health professionals.
• Retain hospital services serving rural communities.
• Encourage rural mobile health services.
• Encourage medical trainees to undertake graduate work in rural areas.

Mental Health

• Ensure mental health funding is ring-fenced so that it is not diverted to other services.
• Give urgent attention to services for child and adolescent mental health needs.
• Significantly strengthen controls around the use of Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT).
• Increase funding for accommodation and related services for people living with, and recovering from, mental illness.

Maori Health as Taonga

• Support research partnerships to meet the urgent need for research that benefits Maori health.
• Increase accessibility of health services to Maori.
• Ensure Maori representation and consultation at all levels of the health service.
• Support rongoa Maori (traditional Maori healing) practitioners and practices.

Reproductive and Sexual Health

• Improve access to family planning and sexual health services.
• Support targeted education and screening programmes to reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted infections.
• Develop a National Infertility Prevention strategy that focuses on ways of protecting fertility.
• Prohibit the use of genetically engineered embryos in all fertility procedures.

Maternal and Child Health

• Improve postnatal care, including care for postnatal depression.
• Improve access to appropriate birth facilities and lead maternity carer, particularly for rural women.
• Investigate why the number of caesarean births has increased.
• Review the explosive growth of prescription of some drugs to children, e.g. Ritalin.
• Develop a national strategy and action plan to encourage healthy eating amongst our children.
• Provide free fruit to all primary schools.

Cancer

• Develop a public awareness campaign to reduce lifestyle risk factors for common cancers such as alcohol, cigarettes, obesity and lack of physical exercise.
• Work for a National Breast Cancer Prevention Strategy.
• Increase funding for research into the prevention and early detection of prostate cancer.
• Increase the early detection of prostate cancer through a public awareness campaign.

Community Care

• Significantly increase funding for the aged and disability care sector.
• Ensure that District Health Boards reimburse homecare workers' travel costs.
• Abolish asset testing for residential care.
• Work with community based agencies to detect and prevent elder abuse and abuse of people with impairments.

Minimising Harm of Alcohol, Drugs and Smoking

• Continue support for smoking cessation programmes.
• Ban broadcast alcohol advertising.
• Require compulsory health warnings on all alcohol products.
• Support continued use of pricing mechanisms to discourage the use of tobacco and alcohol.

Pharmaceuticals

• Ban the ‘direct to consumer’ advertising of pharmaceuticals.
• Require all pharmaceuticals to contain a consumer information panel, which outlines the risks and potential adverse reactions.

Superbugs and Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria, Pandemics, and Electromagnetic Radiation

• Require all diseases caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria to be notifiable.
• Require doctors, wherever possible, to identify the strain of bacteria before prescribing an antibiotic.
• Introduce random testing of chicken meat to ensure it is not contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
• Ban the routine feeding of antibiotics to animals that are not sick or suffering from acute infections.
• Ensure New Zealand is prepared for a pandemic, including stockpiling sufficient doses of antiviral drugs, surgical masks, ventilators, syringes.
• Stop new unshielded high voltage power lines being built within 300 metres of any homes or schools.