HNZ00099060 Appendix One
Issue #34 – 19 December 2024
This is our final Leaders’ Brief for 2024. Our first for 2025 will be on 15 January.
Resetting Health New Zealand
Consultations
There are six consultations currently open in What Say You:
•
Hauora Māori Service - closes Friday 17 January
•
Pacific Health - closes Friday 17 January
•
Data and Digital – closes Friday 31 January
•
National Public Health Service (NPHS) - closes Friday 31 January
•
Procurement – closes Monday 10 February
•
Planning, Funding and Outcomes (PFO) – closes Monday 10 February
Note that consultation periods for Procurement and PFO have been extended until
Monday 10 February 2025.
Actions for you:
•
Have your say on the consultations and encourage your people to do the same.
•
Look after yourself and your team. The Change Hub has lots of information for
people leaders, including a guide on communicating wel during change
, contacts
and tips, and crisis support.
•
If you have any questions about the consultations, email
[email address], or contact your HR Team, HR Business
Partner, or People Partnering Lead.
What’s new
COVID-19 Vaccination Policy Withdrawal
As of Wednesday 18 December, our Pre-employment COVID-19 Vaccination Policy wil no
longer be in effect. This means that while getting vaccinated for COVID-19 is stil
recommended, it won't be expected of new employees.
Actions for you:
•
Continue to inform staff prior to employment of the infectious disease screening
and vaccination requirements in accordance with local policy.
•
Encourage staff to stay up to date with al occupational immunisations including
the latest Covid-19 vaccine, Whooping Cough and MMR.
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• Remind team of Infection Prevention Control practices such as mask-wearing,
hand hygiene, covering coughs and sneezes and environmental cleaning.
Quarter 1 performance reporting released
Today we published our Quarterly Performance Report for Quarter 1, covering the period 1
July to 30 September 2024.
Highlights from the quarter include:
• Ambulatory Sensitive Hospitalisations rates for children 0-4 years reduced.
• Newborn enrolment in general practice continued to increase.
• Screening coverage for cervical and breast cancers improved.
Action for you
• Read more on Te Haerenga and share with your team.
• Read more about the supporting health targets here.
Executive Leadership and Commissioner update
See below for highlights from this week’s Executive Leadership Team (ELT) and
Commissioner Group meetings. The summary gives you a heads up on decisions,
changes or updates so you can communicate with your teams.
ELT this week
ELT had its last face-to-face of the month in Auckland. The meeting did a deep dive on
two issues:
1.
Financials and B25 – A review of year-to-date results to October shows an
improvement on last month September with a deficit of $117m, positive closing
cash balance of $1.498bn, capital spend of $150m. We delivered 88,722 caseweight
discharges, which is slightly up on the previous month by 3.2%, and 4.7% on the
previous year. We have started preparing for B25 aiming to have budgets
(including FTEs) agreed ahead of 1 July 2025. Guidance on information required to
support that process wil be issued through ELT. The Government’s fiscal position is
an important variable as the recently released Half Year Economic and Fiscal
Update (HYEFU) suggests ongoing fiscal challenges wil continue.
2.
ED Health Target –With advice from Dr Peter Jones, National Health Target
Champion for Shorter Stays in Emergency Departments (SSED), there was a deep
dive discussing the variation of current performance across the country and what
supports can help. The key themes from that deep dive are:
▪ Acute care standards and implementation plans, if consistently
applied, can help but there is variation in practice.
▪ A review of previous work that looked at variation in staffing across
the country matched against volume should be undertaken to
assess whether we have a match.
▪ Clinical leadership that supports cross hospital collaboration needs
to be encourage – it’s not an ED target it’s whole of hospital.
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▪ Supporting national groups to spread effective practices e.g. Acute
Care National Steering Group, community of practice bringing
together ED leadership and support.
▪ Look at areas that may benefit from more systematic approaches to
acute demand management (front end of hospital) and capacity to
support early discharging (e.g. ARC, advanced care planning).
Decisions The fol owing policies were approved – Procurement Policy, Technical Guidelines for the
Seismic and Structural Design of Hospital Buildings, Leave Policy and Travel Policy (non-
CME). Our published national policies can be found here.
Thank yous and farewells
Final y, ELT thanked and farewel ed:
▪ Riana Manuel, interim National Director, Hauora Māori Services for
her support of the transition of Te Aka Whai Ora teams to Te Whatu
Ora and her leadership of Māori Health. Selah Hart wil be Interim
National Director, Hauora Māori until recruitment is completed in the
new year.
▪ Patrick O’Doherty, Chief Transformation Officer was also thanked
and farewel ed for his contribution to establishing a transformation
work programme. This has ‘morphed’ into Health NZ Reset, led by
Chris Lowry as Executive Director.
Leave and roster planning
By now most rosters and plans for cover should be in place. As we move into the holiday
period it is important we support as many staff as possible to take annual leave. This
allows them to have a break and assists with managing costs. Rosters should be reviewed
and confirmed to ensure they match the anticipated patient demand and take into
account reduction in planned care. The use of our management tools to support
matching capacity and demand needs to be reinforced to ensure we are appropriately
utilising staff who are rostered before incurring any additional costs of overtime or casual
staff.
As the new grads come on board in the new year, there wil be an uplift in FTE and costs.
Without impacting safety, to minimise the impact of this, casual staff utilisation needs to
be carefully monitored and managed especial y where we have been utilising casual staff
to cover vacancies that have been held for these new staff.
Health & Safety
Building on message from last week, leaders are asked to include Health and Safety
moments in every team meeting that staff have an opportunity to share an action,
observation or learning from health and safety issues that occur in their day-to-day
practice.
Reminders and notices
End of year information
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Our End of Year page on Te Haerenga has useful information to help you and your people
prepare for the end of the year.
Action for you
• Read the information on the end of year page and share this page with your team.
Helpful links
News (Health NZ website)
•
Quarter 1 performance report released
•
Health NZ welcomes Roche’s offer of an Early Access Programme for people with
unresectable hepatocel ular carcinoma
•
Recent uptick in Boostrix immunisations amid whooping cough epidemic, but work
stil to do
•
Mental health and addiction targets: Quarterly results and high-level
implementation plans released
Te Haerenga
• Change Hub
• Resetting Health NZ
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) services
• Kaimahi Hauora Hub
• Rongoā Māori (for employees on a Te Aka Whai Ora agreement)
Access al your Leaders’ Hui recordings
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