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Collaborative Regional Health Plan Underway
The six District Health Boards (DHBs) in the lower North Island are joining together to develop a long-term draft plan for the delivery of hospital based health services in the Central Region.
The draft Regional Clinical Services Plan (RCSP) will provide different options for the development and improvement of secondary and tertiary health services across the region over the next 10 to 15 years. The RCSP involves all of the Central Region’s DHBs - Capital & Coast, Hutt Valley, MidCentral, Whanganui, Wairarapa, and Hawke’s Bay.
“All of the DHBs are working together to find new and better ways of organising, funding, delivering and improving our region’s health services,” said Dr Judith Aitken, Chair of Capital & Coast DHB. “This is a first for the region and at this level possibly a first for New Zealand.”
“We believe a collective approach will enable us to make the best use of the regional resources available to us and make the total regional health budget go further.”
The RCSP will provide a shared vision and framework for future decisions on the development of health services.
All Central Region DHBs will be able to use the RCSP to help make decisions on where to invest our health dollars within a wider regional context. It will be a very useful planning tool.”’
The first of three RCSP workshops was held in Wellington on 4 October with wide representation from DHB medical, nursing and management leaders, as well as Maori and Pacific, primary health and consumers.
“Our priority is to ensure that our community has continued access to services and to ensure they are sustainable into the future. Increasing demand from an ageing population, a changing workforce, funding challenges and new technology mean we need to take a big picture view of the issues facing health service delivery in our region and look at doing things differently – we can’t continue the way we are. The first workshop started an informed debate about how we might achieve this.
“The RCSP is not designed to address the urgent operational pressures on individual DHBs. However, it will help us anticipate changes so that we can manage the challenges that will arise.
“The plan is not about bricks and mortar, it’s about better services. We need to take a broader perspective and recognise that this is about how future services are arranged, where they are best delivered and by whom,” Dr Aitken said.
The RCSP will take account of the broader health environment including the developments taking place in primary heath care and the community.
It will be presented to DHB Boards for consideration in April 2008.
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