Health NZ is proposing slashing jobs from a team that brings in millions of dollars a year for the government. The team also audits and accredits hospitals, rest homes, residential disability and other community providers to ensure they meet safety standards.<\/p>\n
The audit assurance and risk restructure would see 23 jobs go – almost a third of the workforce – from a team dedicated to clawing back over-payments, hunting down fraud, and auditing and certifying the safe provision of care in hospitals and community based services.<\/p>\n
The team is made up of staff who work in audit, accreditation, risk management and the health payment integrity team (HPIT).<\/p>\n
The Public Service Association said the HPIT identified and prevented fraud in the $10 billion primary care, disability and community services budget. The PSA estimated at least three percent or $300 million was lost each year due to civil and criminal fraud and error.<\/p>\n
It said each member of the HPIT recovered $430,000 a year after costs – about a $6 return on investment for every $1 spent – and called the proposal “penny wise, but pound foolish.”<\/p>\n
The proposal would also see the certification audit team disestablished.<\/p>\n
This would effectively create a private monopoly on certification, affecting community based small providers like rest homes, residential mental health and disability care that would face higher accreditation fees, the union said.<\/p>\n
PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said the proposal was the most “blatant example of false economics,” and made no sense to cut “highly skilled and specialised roles that bring in so much money for struggling health budget.”<\/p>\n
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Health NZ is proposing slashing jobs from a team that brings in millions of dollars a year for the government. The team also audits and accredits hospitals, rest homes, residential disability and other community providers to ensure they meet safety standards. The audit assurance and risk restructure would see 23 jobs go – almost a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13254,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13252\/revisions\/13254"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}