Fears that Whanganui and MidCentral district health boards are facing a forced merger are ungrounded says Whanganui Board Chair Kate Joblin.

“I want to make it very clear to the people of the Whanganui region that any shared activities or alliances that we form with MidCentral are for the benefit of our patients. We do not want to end up in a situation such as what happened not so long ago when we were unable to guarantee that Whanganui women could give birth at our hospital. Thankfully we were able to get support from our neighbouring district health board to ensure our women and babies got the service they needed. Importantly, since then we have worked together to strengthen the service for both communities and have minimised the chance of having problems in the future.”

It seems that the centralAlliance between Whanganui and MidCentral DHBs is being compared with Otago and Southland DHBs who have agreed to merge. “Saying we are heading the same way as Southland/Otago takes the comparison too far,” says Mrs Joblin. “Yes, of course we are watching what is going on down in the far south. If there are lessons to be learned then we will certainly take them on board. However we are creating our own model, one that works for us,” she said.

We know that we need clinicians to be really well aligned in their work, we know that we want the management functions to be really well aligned too. If clinicians and management from both district health boards are working well together then who knows, it might make sense to have one board of governors in the future. That is a question I would expect the community to be consulted upon. We mustn’t let this question distract us from continuing to look for opportunities to work together where it makes sense to do so, in order to make our services stronger or reduce costs.

“I know that the board is watching this issue very closely because they are aware of the benefits that can be achieved through collaboration. In the end these benefits are all about enhancing our ability to securing local hospital and health services for our community in the long term.”