KEY POINTS:
Outspoken intensive-care specialist Dr Les Galler is surprised that his honour for services to medicine cites his "high levels of diplomacy".
In making the Auckland City Hospital intensivist a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, the Government says: "He is notable for providing an exceptional standard
of service, saving countless lives, and displaying high levels of diplomacy in the most difficult situations."
Click here for full list of honours
Clearly this refers to his contact with critically unwell patients and their often grief-stricken or angry families, but it also contrasts with his public battles with hospital management and former Auckland District Health Board chairman Wayne Brown.
"I don't really know where the 'diplomacy' comes from," Dr Galler says. "I usually speak up as to how it is and try to do that in a reasonably empathetic manner when you're speaking to families and patients themselves. I would have thought I was moderately outspoken about quite a few things though."
In 2003, he was disciplined by management for criticising, on television, the hospital's facilities for safely handling severely unwell patients with an infectious respiratory disease. The year before, he publicly accused Mr Brown of being ignorant of hospital-based care and holding clinical staff in "utter contempt"; he called for him to resign. Mr Brown, whose comments had angered many health workers, apologised.
Dr Galler said he was "gobsmacked" to be on the honours list. "I don't class myself as outstanding. I'm no different from a lot of my hard-working colleagues, I suspect."
He graduated from the Auckland Medical School in 1976, trained in anaesthesia and intensive care, and became an intensive care specialist at Auckland Hospital in 1983.
Aged 55, he is the older brother of Dr David Galler, a Middlemore Hospital intensivist who spends half his time as a top adviser to Health Minister David Cunliffe and the Director-General of Health, Stephen McKernan.
Dr Les Galler said the management of his hospital seemed to be "going along reasonably", but the health system had big problems to address, like the dispute with junior doctors and the fact that hospitals were almost always full.
He rates his department as world class, but notes a change in its kinds of patients.
"When I first started in the early to mid-80s, intensive care was quite different. Now we have much more of the diseases of lifestyle, many people who have got other serious illnesses that are related to smoking, coronary artery disease, obesity et-cetera, who then pitch up with acute, severe, life-threatening problems. That wasn't quite the case when I first started up, when there were larger numbers of patients, but many of them were relatively fitter and healthier ... but had acute disasters happen to them."
