How can we lean on global insights to build ambitious, sustainable responses to New Zealand's healthcare challenges?

Article written by Chris Ash, KPMG Director and Health Sector Lead

Life in New Zealand - on our special cluster of islands at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean - can, at times, feel a bit isolated from the rest of the world. Anyone who has sat in an airport lounge, staring down the barrel of a 24-hour flight, will know this feeling well.

I often feel like this in relation to our healthcare sector, as we grapple with a set of thorny issues and deeply entrenched challenges. Workforce shortages.  Long patient waits. Dilapidated infrastructure. Inequitable outcomes. These are all things people encounter daily across our country.  And, for those working in the system, I know how tempting it can be to think that it’s only us in this boat!  But despite how it might sometimes feel, we are not alone. The challenges we face are faced globally – and, as such, there are also global solutions we can look to.

This week, alongside colleagues at Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand , KPMG will be welcoming Professor Mark Britnell to Aotearoa.  During his time in the country, Mark will be speaking to sector leaders and innovators about the challenges and opportunities facing healthcare in New Zealand.

Mark’s global lens and almost unrivaled experience of international healthcare was a hallmark of his ten-year tenure as KPMG’s Global Head of Health.  And it is an outlook that is shared by his successor in the role, Dr Anna van Poucke , who we will be welcoming to our shores in March next year.

Here in New Zealand, we experience almost all the common challenges health systems face around the planet, including:

• How to better support and empower the increasing proportion of our population who live with chronic health conditions,

• How to make ‘no health without mental health’ a lived reality,

• How to care appropriately for a population that is rapidly ageing,

• How to address entrenched inequity challenges, particularly for indigenous and minority populations,

• How to protect our critical foundation of universal primary healthcare,

• How, given the constant evolution of technologies and pharmaceuticals and associated public expectations, to provide care at a cost that remains acceptable to the taxpayer,

• How to keep innovating in the face of financial constraints that limit investment in physical and digital assets,

• And, not least, how to build and sustain a workforce capable of meeting all the above challenges

In all corners of the planet, however, there are examples of health systems and organisations that have faced up to problems like these and prevailed.  KPMG’s global network of firms has had the privilege of partnering with many of these systems to bring about such improvements.  There is always so much we can learn.

But each case study is set in its own time, its own place, and its own context.  To say we can learn is not to suggest we need to unquestioningly replicate, to ‘plug and play’ the solutions. 

In 2018, I had the privilege to join a study tour of the Southcentral Foundation ‘Nuka’ health system in Alaska.  Nuka is held up around the world as an exemplar in care integration, values-based leadership, measurable quality improvement, and in effective responses to the health of indigenous populations.  A year later, in partnership with Ngāti Kahungunu Iwi Inc., we welcomed our friends from Anchorage back for a conference held in Napier.  Nuka’s then-CEO Kathryn Gottlieb told me and repeated as often as people would listen, that Southcentral Foundation took the inspiration to fully integrate cultural education and revitalisation of language into their holistic approach to care and healing as a result of visiting New Zealand and learning from Te Ao Māori approaches.  

In healthcare, our challenges are never static.  Change is a constant, and we should be prepared for it.  Yes, we need strong system-focused planning and robust frameworks to invest for value. Yes, we need strong, system-oriented leadership, willing to shoulder broad accountabilities beyond lines of direct control.

But, above all, we need to build a culture of continuous quality improvement - underpinned by curiosity, humility, and a willingness to constantly look outward.  Acceptance that improvement is a journey and not a destination.  And an understanding that learning from others is to be celebrated - not because it helps you get to the ‘holy grail’ of a ‘perfect solution’ quicker; but because the best health systems are capable of taking an idea, improving it, and paying that down by making a substantial contribution back into our global pool of wisdom.