Boris Sokratov: A health or sickness system?

Kyle MacDonald and Hamish Coleman-Ross, co-hosts of The Nutters Club on Newstalk ZB and the hosts of a new web series for Great Minds. Photo / Newstalk ZB

OPINION:

Right now, I suggest we have a sickness system which focuses on ambulances at the bottom of cliffs and does very little for Māori health.

It’s a “clinical sickness treatment model” that has little to do with health. It’s a system that reacts to illness and disease by allocating supply-side funding driven by demand-side sickness. That’s why it’s constantly under pressure.

What we really need is a prevention model that focuses on wellness. The goal should be to reduce the burden on pressure points in primary, secondary, and tertiary care by encouraging people to “be healthy”, not to allocate funding in relation to sickness and disease.

A reduction in demand is a far more effective approach instead of trying to increase supply. The way to achieve that is to empower community-driven lifestyle changes.

The major and most expensive illnesses in our population are lifestyle diseases.

Obesity, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, drug and alcohol addiction and the vast majority of mental illness are primarily lifestyle-driven.

Boris Sokratov. Photo / Supplied

What we need is a prevention system that focuses on community health.

A fence about a hundred miles from the cliff - that’s the way to reduce the need for costly ambulances at the bottom of the cliff.

A genuine health system would divest decision-making back to the communities.

Communities actually know what’s best for their people in that community.

The centralised funding model is seriously flawed.

It’s good at allocating funding, but poor at driving improvements in health by reducing sickness.

Those in charge of funding should be asking communities what they need to keep their communities healthy and well, not being prescriptive and telling them what they need to do, and how to do it, in order to get “funding”.

We will know we’ve got a genuine health system when we start seeing the number of customers (let’s no longer call them patients or clients) presenting at general practices and hospital emergency departments beginning to decline.

Prevention is cure.

Boris Sokratov, is the producer of the Nutters Club Radio Show. He helped establish the Key to Life Charitable Trust, that supports mental health advocate Mike King and the Just Move Charitable Health Trust, along with Rob Campbell and Duncan Garmer, that supports Dave Letele and his BBM programme.