Health Minister David Clark has revealed the decision to remove the public reporting of health targets was not taken to Cabinet and was his own directive.

OPINION: Can you smell that?

That sour odour that comes with being spun something that is in no way for the public good, but for the good of the Government's bare arse alone.

It's wafting from the direction of Health Minister David Clark and his decision to stop the public reporting of National Health Targets, which aim to keep District Health Boards in line on a number of key measures.

There are six of them, and you may have seen them published in newspapers and websites throughout the country on a quarterly basis - report cards, so populations could see exactly how their DHBs were performing.

READ MORE:

* Axing of health targets will lead to deaths, says National

* How's your DHB doing? Govt does away with National Health Targets

* Nearly 60,000 turned away from surgery, Government figures show

* Funding boost fails to make dent in 'phantom waitlists'

There was one for the number of elective surgeries they were performing, one to keep wait times for cancer treatment down, one to boost childhood immunisations, one to keep wait times in emergency departments down and two more vague targets to measure referrals of children at their B4 School checks, and to help smokers receive information to quit.

They weren't perfect - but there is hard evidence and medical research to show the ED target alone saved thousands of lives since its implementation. That is only a good thing.

New Zealand's rates of childhood immunisations have reached nearly 95 per cent for babies aged eight months and two years - the magical "herd immunity" number, up from just over 80 per cent in 2010. Again, only a good thing.

The cancer target had improved wait times for cancer treatment, though patients were undoubtedly still falling through the cracks. We knew this, because we knew what standard was expected.

And that's where the Government's decision takes away power from patients. People who had not received their first cancer treatment within a month knew that was not acceptable, and they knew when to start demanding answers of their clinicians.

David Clark's entire decision appears to be resting on a single claim of "perverse incentives", for which he uses a single uncited news story published last year, that claimed avastin eye injections for macular degeneration, and skin lesion removals, were being used to bump up surgical stats at the expense of more complex, and typically more urgent, elective surgeries like hip and knee replacements.

STUFF DHB National Health Targets provided a baseline measure of service patients could come to expect. The Government has taken that public yardstick away.

So refine the target. Fix that issue - direct those procedures be performed at primary and secondary level - if that is indeed the issue he has. But there is plenty to suggest that's not it.

It's public accountability. These targets did not always paint a glowing picture of DHBs and where there was an issue, the Government had to answer to it.

That's where the targets become a stick with which to beat the Government over the head with, and Clark has taken the stick away. His position has undergone subtle changes over the last week since Stuff revealed targets had not been published for the last two quarters.

He confirmed he'd gotten rid of them the first day, then Clark revealed he was looking into broader ones the following day. Later on, he revealed they were still being measured - these targets that were creating "perverse" harm - just not released.

Perhaps the logic is best illustrated by Clark himself, speaking to media on Thursday.

"We're continuing to measure all of those things that have been measured before because the DHBs answer to the Ministry of Health for their performance."

Just not the public.

* Comments on this story are closed