Health gripes tally highest for Auckland

The Auckland District Health Board is New Zealand's most complained-about health board, according to figures compiled by an official health watchdog.

In the three financial years to last June, Health and Disability Commissioner Ron Paterson's office received 1225 complaints about the services of health boards and/or their staff.

Of them, 165 were about the central Auckland board.

Despite this, it was Wellington's Capital & Coast board which had the most findings against it of breaching the health and disability consumers' code of rights, although the numbers were small at 67 breaches nationally.

And it was West Coast and Capital & Coast which had the highest and second-highest number of complaints per capita.

Mr Paterson, who released the three-year analysis to the Herald under the Official Information Act, said yesterday that those and other complaints to his office about health boards covered topics including informed consent, safe-staffing levels and medication errors.

Some cases involved patients being harmed and in a few the patient had died.

Cases he has reported on in which patients or others have died include the death of an elderly woman after receiving another patient's morphine in Palmerston North Hospital, the Southland board's care of Mark Burton, a mental health patient who killed his mother, and the death of a newborn baby after birthing delays at North Shore Hospital which had involved a registrar and an independent midwife.

Mr Paterson said the total numbers of complaints and breach findings were not a cause for concern.

But the West Coast and Capital & Coast had had it drawn to their attention that they were on the high end of the complaints-per-capita figures, and Mr Paterson was "reasonably satisfied the issues have been followed up" by these boards.

The figures did not mean the boards were providing worse services, he said.

But they might suggest the boards had not done as well as others at sorting out complaints themselves.

The Auckland board chief medical officer, Dr David Sage, last night dismissed the commissioner's figures for his board as "spurious".

He said they did not reflect the fact that around half the board's work was for patients from other health districts.

Capital & Coast made a similar point, less forcefully, adding that it welcomed patient feedback, including complaints.

The West Coast board's chief executive, Kevin Hague, said the main reasons for its leading complaints to the commissioner per capita were the "extremely high" level of public and media interest in health in the region and the fact that the nearest patient advocacy service was in Christchurch.

But he too welcomed complaints and said the board was doing more to try to resolve them at the lowest level possible.