Take control: Southland District Health Board’s Lakes District Hospital at Frankton

After decades of disillusion, suddenly it’s the hour of opportunity to start sorting out healthcare in the Wakatipu.

But if we locals don’t move fast, we may face further years on the back foot.

At last we have the chance to wrest local control of our hospital from DHB hegemony – to ensure we keep the hospital where it is, to keep the present level of hospital-based accident and emergency services, and to have a finger on a raft of increasingly problematic downstream services from maternity to elderly care.

This window for action comes because of the shotgun marriage of the Southland and Otago DHBs, all but confirmed in consultation meetings earlier this month.

With Southland District Health Board out of the way, we can finally get on with what’s long been denied us – a local health trust to run our services.

North Otago, South Otago, Central Otago and Eastern Southland have all had health trusts for a decade – the Wakatipu is the odd one out.

It’s going to take some concerted work, and heavy lobbying by QLDC, health professionals and any other locals with a fast-track to government and to local MP Bill English.

Luckily, we already have a well set-up ginger group – the Wakatipu Health Trust and its tenacious Maria Cole.

She makes the point that it’ll be a rocky and possibly expensive road but our town is fortunate to have more than its share of professionally hard-nosed and benevolent people to help get us there.

Warning signs against inaction are already present.

SDHB wouldn’t let us go it alone 12 years ago – probably because our hospital sits on potentially valuable real estate – and because as a growth area, the Wakatipu boosted SDHB fortunes.

Any new combined DHB might well want to keep its hands on the same golden goose, particularly because of having deficits to rein in.

DHB boss Brian Rousseau has already come out at a local public meeting to muse about Lakes District Hospital’s Frankton site being sold and the hospital rebuilt elsewhere.

When questioned, Rousseau said he didn’t have a clue where.

STV voting means we no longer get a community voice on DHBs.

Local board member Fiona McArthur justifies her relatively head-down attitude by saying she acts for the “whole of Southland” – even though we’re hardly in Southland.

It wasn’t always that way. For decades there were scraps between our local, ward-voted DHB reps and GPs about where our new hospital would go. The GPs wanted it in Queenstown.

We’re no stranger here to mixing it. Deputy-mayor Margaret McHugh set up the Wakatipu Health Development Committee in 1996, initially to staff accident and emergency services at the hospital.

The committee – spearheaded by Graeme Todd, with GP and DHB reps – had six stormy years before SDHB and its then hard-man boss Gershu Paul finally appointed their own hospital doctors.

The A&E system works but it costs. Talk is that the new combined DHB would like to change it.

Let’s sort out tricky things like this, by all means – involve the GPs perhaps, but do it on local terms.

Get central funding and use it as best we can – and as we know best.

Mike Lynch is a founding member of the Wakatipu Health Development Committee