Inequity was the single biggest issue facing health services, outgoing Lakes DHB Ron Dunham told MPs recently.

Addressing parliament's Health Select Committee, Dunham said 'all low hanging fruits” had been picked and other approaches were urgently needed.

Dunham ends his chief executive appointment with the Rotorua-based DHB over the Christmas period, but leaves overseeing library operations combining with health services in Te aka Mauri (Rotorua Public Library) on the same premises.

Strident protests, some bordering on hysteria, from within various sectors of the Rotorua community failed to deter either the DHB or the Rotorua Lakes Council.

Dunham told the Select Committee, as reported in the radio programme Checkpoint, said doubters were now 'biggest fans”.

Rod Dunham.

The hub includes child and adolescent mental health services and Dunham said some worried that the new health services would be too public for those young people.

'They said it was because there were children around them [who] who know that this kid has got mental health problems who was going to the clinic.

'I said, ‘Well, they won't even know because they come into the library – there's clinics going on everywhere'. They will be just one of a number of children attending. They're (the doubters) the biggest fans now,” Dunham said.

There are four-school checks – vision/hearing screening, immunisation, breast feeding and paedeatric out-patient clinics.

The hub had normalised mental health services while slashing a major bug bear for health services, non-attendances at booked clinics.

'The problem we had when we operated our clinics out of the hospital was that the ‘did not attend rates' were really high, even for cancer clinics for children,” Dunham told the MPs. 'It's virtually zero now because the kids really come into the library.”

Mothers with disabled children also found the environment to their liking. Dunham said the library had also blossomed since the change.

'If we're having a clinic for instance for diabetic children the library pitches in to provide the information for the family on diabetes. The siblings go and read books.”

Library director Jane Gilbert confirmed the special collaboration with the Lakes DHB.

'From the very beginning we were determined that there wouldn't be two separate entities occupying the same building, Hilbert said.

'We wanted to have some collaboration between the library and the Lakes DHB. And so, wherever possible, we collaborate with what they're doing and they do the same for us,” Gilbert said.

It was going well.

'People come in here – we don't know what they've come in for [and] we just buzz them through into the DHB if they've got an appointment, and then they take part in our children's programmes as well. So, the families are participating in what the library's doing as well as coming in for their appointments.

Hub manager Bridget Wilson said the move had brought formally isolated health services together.