NZ News
Much-loved donkey visits threatened by St John’s animal therapy programme axing
A Dunedin woman hopes to find a way to keep bringing a little donkey joy to residents of rest homes and dementia units in the wake of Hato Hone St John’s decision to axe its animal therapy programme, Therapy Pets.
The organisation has cut a raft of community programmes including its hospital volunteers, community carers and pet therapy services, affecting around 1100 volunteers.
Dunedin woman Pim Allan and her husband have been a part of their programme, bringing 25-year-old Hoeti and 15-year-old Travis to dementia units over summer.
Photo: Supplied / Pim Alan
She said there had been an overwhelmingly positive response to the visits.
The residents look forward to the visits for days beforehand and talk about it a lot afterwards.
“One of the managers came to us and said there was a lady who usually stays in her room the whole time and doesn’t communicate with anybody who came out, sat in the sunshine with the other residents, interacted with the donkeys and spoke to some people – she’d been at the rest home for quite a while and hadn’t done that before.
“At another rest home, my husband was walking around with the donkey, and an old man put his arms around the donkey and cried. We’ve both been quite moved ourselves by the response of the residents.
Photo: Supplied / Pim Alan
And she said the donkeys enjoy the visits too.
“They love it. They load into the float really easily, and we can’t get them back in at the end.”
Alan said she and her husband will be look what would be involved in terms of insurance and other requirements to continue the visits on their own.
In an email to volunteers, Hato Hone St John said it had to make tough decisions about where it could have the greatest impact with the resources it has.
Hato Hone volunteers work in hospital emergency departments supporting patients and their whānau and offering support to long stay patients, as well as visiting rest homes, reading to residents and helping with grocery shopping.
Hato Hone St John Deputy chief executive Pete Loveridge said the decision was not down to cost cutting, but because the programmes were not aligned with its new ten-year strategy.
The organisation would explore whether the services could be passed to other organisations over coming months, Loveridge said.
Another pet therapy provider said she would welcome St John volunteers.
Photo: Supplied / Pim Alan
Canine Friends Pet Therapy provided a similar service to St John, taking dogs to hundreds of rest homes, hospital and hospices throughout the country, though it charged a small membership fee to pet owners.
Its president, Vicky Graham, told Checkpoint she had been trying to get in touch with St John, and would welcome volunteers facing the axe.
The benefits of pet-facilitated therapy were becoming better known and appreciated, Graham said.
“We share our dogs with people in need – people that are distressed, elderly people that are sick and in going through rehabilitation, just to enrich their lives and wellbeing.”
It also gave volunteers a sense of purpose to see the joy their dogs provided, she said.
Source: RNZ
Latest News
Opportunities to mitigate multi-million-dollar RNZ budget blowout likely missed – experts
Multiple opportunities to identify and mitigate a multi-million-dollar budget blowout at RNZ appear have been missed, according to the former executive director at Audit New Zealand.
The public broadcaster on Monday revealed a near $12 million shock financial loss after a litany of financial blunders, which will now lead to sweeping job cuts.
The $11.8m loss is more than 25 times the $470,000 RNZ had expected to lose over the year to June.
CEO Paul Thompson took responsibility for the result, and said internal reports gave an inaccurate picture of the finances, meaning the scale of the loss only became clear in October.
RNZ’s former chief financial officer Hilary Parker resigned unexpectedly in early October.
The board said it would commission an independent review into what went wrong.
Independent contractor Stephen Walker, who left the Audit Office earlier this year, said the size of the loss was surprising, as was the length of time it took to identify it – months after the financial year ended.
Supplied / OAG
“Probably more of a concern is that they had seemingly been unaware that they were running up a significant deficit until they were in the preparation stage of their annual report in October.”
Walker said public entities typically produced monthly financial reports.
An interim audit also took place before the end of the financial year, he said, but if the organisation hadn’t identified significant losses at that stage, the auditor could also be in the dark.
“It seems that there’s a real weakness in forecasting and budgeting that’s occurred here and that the monthly accounts, when they’re produced, either haven’t identified these significant variances against budget or the magnitude of them really hasn’t come to light until right towards the end of the financial year,” Walker said.
“And really at that point, there’s no opportunity for the chief executive, the leadership team to take, and the board to take, any corrective action because the year has effectively been completed.”
Walker said the “significant miss” was difficult to account for given it was more than 10 percent of RNZ’s total funding.
He said based on RNZ’s annual report, financial complexity didn’t appear to be a factor.
“This $11.8m loss isn’t made up of one particular item … it seems to have been contributed to by a number of separate expense lines running over budget. So I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with complexity.”
Among the errors, RNZ wrongly counted $2m from land sales as income in its budget. Staff costs also came in $3.2m over budget, including $1.4m in redundancy payments.
Professor at Auckland University’s business school Norman Wong said based on media reports the issues identified were “significant and troubling”.
Supplied / University of Auckland
“But recognising the sale of land as income in their budget is a basic error that one would have expected to have been caught and corrected well before it got to this point.”
With funding reductions at RNZ over the past two years, Walker expected greater scrutiny of financial results.
“Virtually every public entity has had their annual budget reduced. And so you would expect … the leadership team on a monthly basis and board – I’m not sure how frequently the board will consider the information – but you would expect them to be interrogating the results on a regular basis throughout the year,” he said.
Walker said initiating an independent review was the correct course of action and that he’d want to understand what information the leadership team and the board were regularly receiving.
He said he’d “love to say” surprising financial results were rare, but conceded they occured on a semi-frequent basis during his time leading the Audit Office.
“The benefit of independent scrutiny by the Audit Office – and the auditors providing that support to the Auditor General – [is] that the reporting is fairly presented at the end of the year, whether it’s good, bad or ugly.”
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