This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including exploring the NCEA and UE results of every college around NZ, the collapse of the Du Val property empire, revealing claims a former funeral director at Tipene Funerals was swindling grieving clients and charting the 10-year police probe that brought down Wayne Doyle and the Head Hunters.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2024. Today we take a look at some of the biggest health investigations of the year.
Unsafe staffing and a broken health system: How safe are NZ hospitals?
In Wellington, an overworked community psychiatrist became so exhausted and disillusioned about his working conditions that he quit and moved back to the US. “If I’m going to work in a s***show, I might as well do it closer to home,” he said.
In Palmerston North, the head of the local hospital’s emergency department wrote a desperate letter to the chief executive of Te Whatu Ora-Health New Zealand saying he didn’t have enough junior doctors left to provide a safe acute medical service.
And in Auckland, more than 150 nurses in one of the city’s busiest emergency departments signed a health and safety notice warning that chronic understaffing was constantly putting them and patients in danger.
Across the country, staff in public health services ranging from EDs to radiology to mental health are working in increasingly difficult conditions.
A hospital system pushed to the brink by the Covid-19 pandemic is now confronting another crisis. A Herald investigation highlights the impact it is having on staff and patients.
Quest for a vaccine to fight rheumatic fever: A disease that kills and maims hundreds of Kiwis
In a lab across from Auckland Hospital, a scientist steadily works towards a world-first vaccine for a Third World disease that still claims well over 100 lives every year in New Zealand.
Dr Jacelyn Loh’s TeeVax vaccine works to boost the immune system to fight off infections from Group A streptococcus bacteria, including “strep throat”.
If untreated, those infections can trigger an autoimmune condition called acute rheumatic fever, which inflames and damages heart valves, resulting in disability and early death – often decades later.
On average, about 140 New Zealanders die from rheumatic heart disease every year.
When could the vaccine breakthrough happen? The answer could depend on funding.
‘We found it!’: Meet the Kiwi DNA detectives helping sick kids around the world
Robert Chalmers-Wilson, to anyone who’s met him, is a happy, thriving boy.
On the inside, mum Louise says, things are a little more complex.
The Invercargill 8-year-old was born with a condition so remarkably rare that just a few hundred cases have ever been reported globally.
Currarino syndrome - which has an estimated prevalence of one in 100,000 - involves spinal defects that left him missing vertebrae and a tailbone.
Had it not been for the earlier loss of his brother, Jackson, from complications with the same syndrome, and the efforts of their pediatrician who suggested the cause, it may have taken months or years before the family knew what they were up against.
Recently, after eight years, Robert at last got a molecular diagnosis that confirmed the syndrome.
It didn’t come from scientists at some sprawling research institute in California or Germany, but a small team at Otago University, just a few hours up the road.
Professor Stephen Robertson and his team of crack DNA detectives tackle genetic disorders that few of us have ever heard of. For the families they help, their work is life-changing.
‘Outrageous’ difference in fees charged to cancer patients by private clinics
Cancer patients paying for life-extending drugs are being charged tens of thousands of dollars more at some private cancer clinics, despite the price of the medicine being the same.
That’s because of variation in treatment or administration fees, charged each time a person receives a dose of their drug - which might be as often as once every three weeks.
In some cases, the difference in price between clinics can add up to more than $27,000 a year.
The discrepancy has caused some patients to regularly travel long distances to access cheaper care, or turn to family, friends and the wider community to help fundraise the tens of thousands of dollars needed.
Currently, NZ spends less than a third of what other countries spend on medicines, after accounting for population size and GDP.
This strangles the supply of new drugs that are standard care in comparable countries and forces people to try to find money to have medicines administered privately.
Finding the money is difficult in today’s economic environment and with many others needing help, every dollar matters in the fight for more time.
Kiwis with rare condition spend up to $200k for surgery overseas. Does it work?
Treatment for a rare condition in Germany is coming under more scrutiny as the number of New Zealanders crowdfunding to get surgery overseas keeps rising.
At least 20 New Zealanders who have been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) or associated vascular compression syndromes have travelled to Germany at their own cost to be diagnosed and operated on by two German doctors.
Many of the patients say the surgery changed their life and they felt it was their only option because of what they saw as a lack of dedicated treatment in New Zealand.
Two recent reviews in New Zealand paint a more complicated picture. They say the diagnoses are unusual and that the procedures are not backed by robust evidence.
The outcomes of the surgeries are mixed or unclear, the reviews found.