A leaked letter from Bay of Plenty District Health Board chief medical officers claims patients are 'choosing to die” rather than commence life maintaining treatment due to a lack of available options in the region.

The letter says patients have to travel to Hamilton three times a week for haemodialysis due to the 'lack of facilities” in the BOP, and it's 'not an exaggeration” to state patients are choosing to die rather than undertake this 'burden on their quality of life”.

Signed by 30 health specialists in the Bay of Plenty back in December 2021, the letter also outlines patients with bowel cancer have been on waiting lists 'for months longer than recommended times” leading to palliative rather than curative treatment plans.

The letter set out to express 'significant concern regarding the state of resources for the effective delivery of the planned care at Bay of Plenty District Health Board”.

Both Minister of Health Andrew Little and Bay of Plenty MP Todd Muller suggest their opposing parties have "under funded" the Bay of Plenty District Health Board, despite a large growth in population.

Speaking on how the DHB got to this state, Minister of Health Andrew Little says when the Labour Government took office in 2017 'we inherited a mess”.

Minister of Health Andrew Little speaking at Tauranga Hospital earlier this year. Photo: Taylor Rice/SunLive.

'As the doctors said in their letter, the health system was under funded for years, despite record population growth,” says Little.

'We've addressed that by increasing the health budget by nearly 45 per cent, to a record $24 billion per year.”

'We've got a $7 billion hospital rebuilding programme under way, there are 20 per cent more doctors and nurses working in public hospitals now than there were in 2017, with big recruitment campaign underway to train and hire more. We're also putting more money into medicines and mental health.”

Bay of Plenty MP Todd Muller says the health system was performing well prior to Labour taking office, and points to the publicly reported BOP DHB targets and performances for the end of 2017, which were in the 2018 BOP DHB quality account.

Bay of Plenty MP Todd Muller. Photo: Taylor Rice/SunLive.

'I was completely guttered and emotionally impacted when I read the letter. As a local MP, you put a lot of pressure on the Government to advocate for your community.

'When you see the specialists in the community saying people are dying because of the lack of resources and would be kept alive in other places, it is an absolutely devastating thing for this community to read and a complete indictment on this Government.

'We had specific targets which needed to be met. If a DHB missed it, the report was there every quarter showing what it was,” says Muller.

'We put huge pressure on [the health system]. These targets no longer are made public since 2018, and a number of them no longer exist. That was done by this Government who say the targets ‘no longer work' and they are ‘philosophically opposed to them'.

'We weren't perfect in our nine years, but man did we change the focus of the hospital to be transparent about what it was doing, what its KPIs were, and everyone in the community could see it.

'Now, apart from the poor people who have been affected by it personally, we only got to find out the tragic state of Tauranga Hospital through a leaked letter signed by 30 specialists who are saying it is ‘completely unacceptable.'”

Muller says a National Government will 'absolutely” reinstate a similar public KPI system for New Zealand's health system.

'We'd have an absolute focus on working with the health professions to ensure they have the resources necessary to do their jobs.

'This Government is spending millions in setting up new, Wellington bureaucracies to run health in this country. It is just like what they are doing with mental health. The Government spent $1.9 billion on mental health which was audited three months ago, and showed the mental health provision has not improved in this country despite the spending.

'The same happens here, the money goes in, gets lost in the system and it's not getting to the people that need it. That has to change.”

On the concerns with bowel cancer patients facing delays 'for months” in the letter, Little says the previous Government set up a bowel screening programme that was 'barely funded and had no plan”.

Minister of Health Andrew Little points to 15 years of under funding as being the root of the problem.

'We have put $203 million into the programme and rolled it out across the county, with Bay of Plenty joining in June this year.”

'At the time the letter was written, 88 per cent of patients in the Bay of Plenty DHB region who received treatment for upper and lower GI tumours did so within the target of 31 days. The situation in the BOP has got better since then; in August this year, 96 per cent were treated within 31 days.”

Little says the letter raises concerns about Bay of Plenty people not getting the same level of care as those in other areas, which is a key reason why the Government wanted to merge DHBs across the country.

'The reason we changed the health system was that too many district health boards we under-performing and not providing consistent levels of care.

'The system changed on July 1, and we now have the ability to have the same standards of care in every hospital.”

Little says while he 'didn't expect” the system to have changed within four months, he is 'satisfied with the progress to date”.

Muller says he 'fundamentally disagrees” with Andrew Little on the topic of centralising health.

Bay of Plenty MP Todd Muller disagrees with the Government's decision to centralise the health system. Photo: File/SunLive.

'I do not believe centralising health and bureaucratising it in Wellington will lead to more immunisations, shorter stays in Tauranga Hospital ED, faster cancer treatments in Tauranga, it belies belief that he thinks a centralised system would work better.

'Under their watch, they have seen a collapse in the quality of service provided to the most vulnerable in this city.”

A spokesperson for Te Whatu Ora, Health New Zealand says the letter was written in December last year, when Margie Apa 'hadn't formally taken up the role as interim Chief Executive.

'That didn't happen until February this year,” says the spokesperson.

'She saw the letter when she was in BOP earlier this month, she wouldn't want to downplay the concern clinicians have, she discussed with the team there that solutions are across the system, no silver bullet.”

The spokesperson says they made Ministry of Health chief medical officer Andrew Connolly aware of the media interest, and he says the letter 'highlights why we need to change and why the taskforce didn't focus only on elective operating”.