DHB Board meeting to respond to Minister’s plan to sack entire Board

Waikato DHB’s Board members have cancelled their normal monthly open Board meeting on Wednesday 24^th April, substituting it with a closed session dealing only with its response to Minister David Clark’s pre-Easter proposal to sack the Board.

Board member Dave Macpherson commented “while there may have been ample reason to sack the previous Board for their oversight of the Nigel Murray debacle, the Minister risked destroying some good work that is now starting to happen.”

Mr Macpherson, newly elected onto the Board with Mary Anne Gill in late 2016, pointed several matters the previous Board under Chair Bob Simcock had overseen:

• the appointment of Nigel Murray without full due diligence, especially relating to the fact he had been removed from his previous job as CEO of a Canadian health board
• the lax, or non-existent, controls over Murray’s personal unauthorised spending, amounting to over $200,000
• the acceptance of the ill-fated Health Tap ‘smart health’ app and electronic healthcare system that cost $millions more than budgeted, and delivered thousands of customers less
• the decision to renovate a Hamilton CBD office block for the DHB at a supposed cost of $7.7million, that ballooned out to $14.7m, and reduced in scope so much that many staff planned to be housed in it are still looking for accommodation.

“Mr Murray’s resignation was accepted by a Board meeting that Ms Gill and myself were excluded from, before he was investigated for any criminal breaches.”

In addition, Mr Macpherson said, the 2017/18 Year Budget, advised as a ‘zero deficit’ budget to the then Minister Jonathan Coleman by then Chair Simcock, “was in reality a $38m deficit budget, that the Board knew about, but still claimed otherwise.”

Mr Macpherson pointed out that he risked his seat on the Board “by openly leaking the true deficit figure to the public and media. Because I thought it was wrong that the public were not being told the truth about the real financial situation of the Board.”

He pointed out that the final actual deficit for that year proved to be $39m, “very close to the figure I’d given out, but that the new Minister is now complaining about.”

“If there was a right time to get fresh blood in,” he said, “when Bob Simcock resigned was the time it should have been done.”

“Since then, the current Board has worked quite hard to turn around the deficit, which won’t happen overnight, but for which there is a plan that they’ve been working with the Ministry of Health on.”

“We have also spent a lot of time on considering ways to radically turn around the poor Maori health outcomes in Waikato, and ironically a meeting to progress that was axed two weeks ago when the Minister’s call to sack the Board came out the day before.”

Mr Macpherson agreed that the current Board (minus himself) had “stuffed up” the process of appointing a new, permanent CEO earlier this year, but stated “this was the direct result of the Board leadership unilaterally deciding to try to overturn the Coroner’s findings from the Inquest into my son’s death, the reason I was not involved. Board members other than Chair Sally Webb had no input into this unprecedented decision.”

“I say to Minister Clark that it will take far more than a Commissioner to ‘fix’ some of these problems, particularly the growing shortfall of funding across the public health sector.”

“Sack the Board if you think they’ve done poorly, but don’t shift the blame to them, or any other DHB, for chronic systemic problems the public health system has been facing for many years.”