Our Vision
A people-centred health system in which health consumers/patients work in true
partnership with health care providers for health and well-being, and in
which health consumer/patient rights and safety are paramount.
Our Goal
To contribute to creating a patient-centred health system that encourages transparency and shared decision making; to ensuring that the consumer voice is not only heard but that co-design with lived experience consumers is at the heart of all legislation/regulation, policy, development, design, implementation, research and service provision within the health system.
Our Objectives
- To create a genuine, broad-based health consumer advocacy group in New Zealand, by consumer for consumers, that represents the voice and concerns of all New Zealanders in all health matters. To ensure that lived experience consumers have a voice and are represented in co-design of health services and delivery at all levels of the health system.
- To contribute to culture change, particularly in the relationship between health care providers and patients/consumers, to ensure that service providers work in equal partnership for the health and well-being of patients.
- To ensure everyone facing a health challenge in New Zealand has a positive and safe healthcare experience.
- Patients are encouraged and empowered to take charge of their own health through shared decision making with health professionals.
- To promote the establishment of an official, independent health consumer/patient advocacy and mediation role (Commissioner) outside the health entities, independently appointed, with including the provision of independent, unbiased data collection on adverse events and harm.
- To promote the establishment of an official, independent health consumer/patient advocacy and mediation role (Commissioner) outside the health entities, independently appointed, with including the provision of independent, unbiased data collection on adverse events and harm.
Our Priorities
- Achieving effective co-design in all the documents that will created under the new Te Whatu Ora | Health New Zealand, including the New Zealand Health Plan and various health strategies.
- Promoting transparency in health, including accountability to health consumers.
- To address the ongoing lack of true health consumer representation and consumer voice in New Zealand by ensuring consumers with lived experience are at the centre of co-design.
- To ensure that patient safety is addressed and current inadequacies, such as the under-regulation of medical devices, are remedied, and that patient harm is significantly and continually reduced.
- To ensure that there is recognition, responsibility and accountability by New Zealand health entities when issues within the health system are raised, and that they respond with speed and agility, in particular those concerning patient safety/patient harm, and to establish effective prevention of harm policies so patterns of harm are identified early, and strategies are put in place immediately to mitigate further harm.
- Transparency around improvements being made to the Risk of Harm notification process, including any newly created policy that impacts directly on patients.