Today, the Controller and Auditor-General John Ryan wrote to chairman of Parliament’s Health Select Committee, National MP Sam Uffindell, to inform the panel on how well the ministry had done in implementing its recommendations.
The letter said “some progress” had been made but further work was required to address the recommendations from 2020 and give the public assurance that New Zealand holds sufficient reserves for future emergencies.
“In recent work on the public sector’s response to Covid-19, we observed shortcomings in the national security, emergency, and health systems that could have affected the effectiveness of the Covid-19 response.
“Some of these arose because previous review recommendations had not been implemented.”
The Auditor-General said since its review, the health system had undergone significant restructuring – including the disestablishment of DHBs.
It said the health system was better positioned than it was in 2020 to source, manage, and distribute PPE because these functions have been centralised in Health NZ
“Despite this, in 2023/24, $55.167 million of NRS supplies was written off. About $2 million of this included vaccine stock that had reached its expiry date and could not be rotated through hospitals because it would be used only in the event of a pandemic.”
Progress had not been consistent across all recommendations, including the need to update national plans and modelling to determine how much stock should be held in the NRS and who should have access to it.
The ministry attributed this slow progress to the health sector reforms and – more recently – to reduced staff numbers.
“With increasing pressure on staffing numbers and budgets, which the ministry told us has delayed progressing recommendations from our report, there is a risk that emergency preparedness, including replenishing the national reserve supplies (NRS) holdings in line with workforce changes and population increases, might be deprioritised.
“The ministry told us that restructuring in 2023 and 2024 has delayed work to review the National Health Emergency Plan (NHEP) but that it is recruiting staff to do the work and plans to start the review in early 2025. It plans to review its H5N1 pre-pandemic vaccine usage policy in 2025, if it can secure sufficient staffing to do this.”
The ministry reported to the Auditor-General that based on its experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, it needs to hold enough PPE stock to last for 12 weeks of high pandemic usage.
The Auditor-General said there were short-term breaches of this performance measure in July 2022 while Health NZ was waiting for orders to arrive, but that this measure has been met since then.
Julia Gabel is a Wellington-based political reporter. She joined the Herald in 2020 and has most recently focused on data journalism.
