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Our public healthcare system must be healed so that it can care for patients and healthcare workers. Because of the efforts of many people and organisations, the message is getting through. This election is fast becoming about saving our public health system.

We must keep going.

We’ve been busy since our last newsletter.

• Hosted our ‘'Health of the Nation’’

• Got our posters up around the country (thanks to your generous donations)

• Our Chair Rob Campbell was interviewed by Jack Tame on Q+A , and

• Kaitiaki Hauora featured on the front page of The Post…

Andrea Vance reported on Kaitiaki Hauora’s finding that the Government’s $95 million-a-year boost for general practice is being funded by a corresponding reduction in the budget for hospital and specialist services.

Thanks in large part to your generous donations, our campaign posters hit the streets in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch last week! They tell the story of healthcare workers, struggling in an underfunded, under-resourced public health system.

Next Week: Patient Safety Forum

Join us for an important conversation about patient safety in Aotearoa.

Hear from patients and whānau with lived experience, clinicians, health advocates and political leaders about what needs to change to make healthcare safer for everyone.

The Patient Safety Forum is being held as part of World Patient Safety Day 2026 and brings people together to share experiences, ideas and solutions, and put patient safety firmly on the agenda.

Thursday 17 September, 6.30pm

Fickling Centre, Three Kings, Auckland

Free event. Everyone welcome. Register your free seat here.

Hosted by the Health Consumer Advocacy Alliance, Patient Voice Aotearoa and Kaitiaki Hauora | Together for Public Health.

RNZ reports on our ‘Health of the Nation’ event in Porirua

Two weeks again, at Pātaka in Porirua, we brought five very different perspectives together to talk about the Health of Our Nation.

Reporter Penny Smith from RNZ came along. She talked to our speakers and to people in the room and produced a pretty extraordinary snapshot of what is happening across our health system right now.

Among those at the meeting was long-time Cannons Creek resident Sandra Merediths.

She said that last year she waited in a lobby at Wellington Hospital for eight hours, before being seen by a nurse. Her own assessment of the health system was blunt.

"It's bloody shocking. People can't get the service they need ... don't have enough good places where older people can be cared for when they have health issues. Services at home for some people that could live at home are limited," she said

.

Also in the audience was a UK Doctor, who had been living and working in New Zealand for eight years.

Disillusioned by what he'd seen in this country, he was now considering returning to England - and his secondary career as a bus driver.

"Why would I stay around and watch another public health system be vandalised and destroyed in New Zealand, having seen that happen in the UK over the last three decades?"

Read RNZ’s full write up on the event here.

Kaitiaki Chair interviewed on Q+A with Jack Tame

Our chair Rob Campbell joined Jack Tame on Q+A to talk about why New Zealand needs to stop treating health as something that happens once somebody gets sick and turns up at a GP clinic or hospital.

Vaccination matters – even though, as Rob points out, no vaccine is perfect. But so do housing, education, nutrition, prevention and accessible care in our communities.

That’s what an “all-of-health” approach looks like.

Because waiting for people to get sick, waiting for hospitals to buckle under entirely predictable pressure, and then scrambling to respond isn’t a health strategy.

One of our three asks is simple: fund our public health system properly.

Enough to plan. Enough to prevent. Enough to provide the healthcare New Zealanders need.

Watch Rob’s full Q+A interview with Jack Tame here.

Keep an eye out: Roadshow coming to a town near you in October

Sharon Murdoch’s cartoon in The Post

Help us do more

If you believe in what we’re doing, please help us make it happen.

Every donation helps us reach more people, support more campaign activity and keep fighting for a properly funded, equitable and publicly delivered health system.

Whether it’s $10, $50 or something more, your support helps us keep doing the work.

Please donate to Kaitiaki Hauora today.