In New Zealand’s Auckland, doctors will have to consider a patient’s ethnicity too now along with other factors while prioritising anyone for surgery. Officials of the country’s public health agency Te Whatu Ora say that ethnicity is just one of the five factors to be considered, which are clinical priorities, time spent on the waitlist, geographical location, deprivation level, and then ethnicity, reported NZ Herald.
These steps are meant to address poor health outcomes in Maori and Pacific populations.
Introduced in February this year, this new policy is meant to benefit Maori and Pacific Island patients on the grounds that they have unequal access to healthcare. In the category of ethnicity, people from Maori and Pacific Islands are at the top of the list while people from Europe, New Zealand, and other ethnicities like India and China are lower in ranks.
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The policy, however, hasn’t gone down well with surgeons who labelled the directives as indefensible in medical terms. They argued that patients should be prioritised based on illness, urgency for treatment and not based on their ethnicity. “There’s no place for elitism in medicine, and the medical fraternity in this country is disturbed by these developments,” a surgeon told the portal on condition of anonymity.
New Zealand Health Minister Ayesha Verrall defended the new system, suggesting that when it came to prioritising healthcare, there have been more important reasons why ethnicity is a factor. She pointed to the health system in 2018, where it was discovered that the system did not serve everyone well and produced unequal outcomes, specifically for the vulnerable part of society.
“The reformed health system seeks to address inequalities for Maori and Pacific people, who historically have a lower life expectancy and poor health outcomes,” Verall was quoted as saying by the portal.
Before New Zealand introduced health reforms last year, half of the District Health Boards had considered or committed to prioritising Maori and Pacific patients for some elective surgeries only. However, data showed that Maori and Pacific's people take longer to have procedures even after referrals.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
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