Dave Macpherson: What can happen to self-entitled health sector bureaucrats, or what goes round comes round….

Three years ago the stars of four men who had responsibility for the care of our son – and a lot of other people – were in the ascendency: ‘Dr’ Nigel Murray the well-fed DHB CEO; Bob Simcock the laid-back DHB Board Chair; Chai Chuah the bean-counting Health Ministry boss; and ‘Dr’ Jonathan Coleman the ‘all care, no responsibility’ Health Minister.

Three years on, and every one of them has bitten the dust, some of them almost literally. Coleman went down the tubes with the tired, expired, National Government, and then failed to raise a whimper of interest from his colleagues when putting up his hand for Leader before decamping for a cushy private sector job; Chuah was told to jump, or be pushed, by the incoming Labour Health Minister David Clark – as a bean counter the only effort he’d expended in the health sector was to screw the expenditure down as far as possible, and the many and various incompetencies in his Ministry came back to bite him.

On the Waikato DHB front, Nigel ‘No Show’ Murray’s name has become a byword for rorting the taxpayer (as in ‘he was caught doing a Nigel’), while perhaps the most despicable of the lot has been Bob Simcock, a former senior Nat MP appointed by his mates to a safe little job chairing a few meetings a year for $60k, who turned a blind eye to Nigel’s $218k taxpayer-funded ‘expenses’, complete with $500 a night hotel rooms, rental cars for his friends, travel for not one but two ‘other’ women, and absences for more than half of the working year – and then tried to shift the blame onto the DHB accounts department, when a series of official reports basically showed he was incompetent at his job.

As an elected DHB Board member, I found each of these men bloody difficult to deal with; the arrogance and absences of Murray, and the ‘so laid-back he was nearly asleep’ attitude of Simcock were complemented by Coleman who as Minister couldn’t see a DHB budget deficit even when it hit him in the face, and Chai Chuah the Health Ministry head who’s Ministry couldn’t count and provided vital information late, if at all to DHBs.

As the family of a mental health ‘consumer’ who died while in their care, we found each of these four men despicable, and are glad they are gone; Murray for taking off on one of his overseas jaunts almost immediately after  our son Nicky’s death, leaving others to deal with the crisis, and then cynically delaying the internal review into his death for over a year on bullshit grounds; Simcock for refusing to get involved when Nicky was still alive and the train wreck could be seen approaching – despite requests directly to him, and then ensuring that his gutless Board (the majority) wouldn’t fund our legal costs like they did all of the staff involved;  Chai Chuah for never personally acknowledging our complaints to him about the DHB, but passing them along to his minions; and Coleman for refusing to meet with us to discuss the issues arising from our son’s death, and for denying the importance of suicide as a major issue until just before the election.

We’re not just pleased they’re gone, we’re ecstatic – but at the same time realise that, without some pretty close scrutiny, there will be plenty more similar shysters where they come from. One of the things this has shown is that it is important not to give up when you are up against the ‘machine’ – it can be hard work, and those who are feeling a bit of reflected heat will generally urge you to ‘move on’ and to ‘start looking to the future’.

We remind ourselves that our fight is helping others in similar situations, and that we are making some progress. The encouragement we’ve received has helped enormously, including from some of the mainstream media, and we know that we have many friends cheering for us.

David Macpherson is TDB’s mental health blogger. He became involved in mental health rights after the mental health system allowed his son to die. He is now a Waikato DHB Member.