Hospice New Zealand has revealed cost cutting measures are in place at end-of-life care facilities around the country, including reducing the number of patient beds and restricting admissions in some cases.
“I would say at least two-thirds of them have already taken some measures and are taking more, and some of them are planning what they can do next,” chief executive Wayne Naylor told 1News.
Hospice New Zealand reports of the nearly 38,000 people who died in New Zealand in 2024, 10,860 received hospice care.
The organisation has gone public with the cost cutting measures ahead of its annual awareness week.
Other actions include freezing recruitment, restructures, reduced community care and not being able to respond to changing patient needs from the hospice service.
The Government partially funds hospice care, putting $114 million into 28 hospices in 2024, according to Hospice NZ.
An additional $112 million came from fundraising and donations, but this wasn’t enough to prevent operating costs exceeding funding for many hospices.
Naylor is calling for a $16 million one-off investment from Government to cover the latest shortfall, and a commitment to overhauling how funding is determined.
Hospices have different contracts from the previous district health system for providing different services.
“We need a new funding model that’s based on the cost of actually delivering services,” Naylor said.
Naylor added hospices have been struggling financially because of rising costs and growing patient demand for a couple of years, but the organisation wants the public to know the extent of their financial shortfall now after hearing the Government is unlikely to increase funding.
“We’ve tried really hard to work with Health New Zealand on securing extra funding, and that has not gone anywhere yet and probably won’t go anywhere, so we need to make it a public issue that our Crown agency is not prepared or able to give us more funding.
“But we also know that the Minister of Health wants to put patients first and wants to see efficiencies and more effectiveness in our health system, and we know that hospices can deliver that.”
Hospice care reduces the number of people entering emergency departments and hospitals and seeking medical attention from general practitioners, he said.
“So hospices save the health system a lot of money.”
A report by advisory firm MartinJenkins commissioned by Hospice New Zealand and released in March, found for every $1 spent by the Government on hospice care, there’s at least $1.59 in health benefits for the taxpayer.
Mary Potter Hospice in Wellington is facing an expected $500,000 deficit this financial year, chief executive Tony Paine told 1News.
The hospice has been restructured, beds have stayed at a reduced number post Covid-19 and some vacancies have been frozen.
Paine said at times staff have had to prioritise referrals to a greater extent than usual, leaving some patients waiting for longer.
“You can imagine that people come to work in palliative care because they care so deeply about making sure that someone doesn’t have to be alone in the last weeks and months and days of their life and to have to make people wait and say, ‘We’re sorry, we’ve got too many other urgent people’ and our staff really feel the pain of that.”
“I don’t want to live in a community where people who are dying don’t get cared for,” he said.
Charlotte Crowe witnessed her late husband’s care at Te Omanga Hospice in Lower Hutt as his motor neurone disease symptoms worsened before his death in December 2023.
“One of his dying wishes was to be here in the inpatient unit and so to not have been able to provide that for him would have left me with a sense of not having done what he wanted.
“I think it has given me an ability to move on knowing that we gave him the passing that he wanted here, with our children, and it also gave the kids a level of support that perhaps we wouldn’t have got if we were anywhere else,” she said.
Crowe said she is concerned hospices are implement cost cutting measures and thinks the Government should increase funding for hospice care.
“It kind of makes me feel a little bit panicky in terms of looking at the last six months of Ian’s life and how much the hospice did for us in that time.”
The services included nurses and doctors visiting the family at home and in the hospice to provide Ian’s treatment, meals while in hospice care, physiotherapy, massage therapy, Ian’s life story being documented by a volunteer and counselling.
The family continue to have access to counselling, if they want it.
“I don’t want to even imagine for other families what that might be like if we had to restrict any of those services in any way,” Crowe said.
Health New Zealand national director for planning, funding and outcomes Jason Power told 1News hospices are a “very valuable component of the New Zealand health system”.
Power said the Government organisation will continue meeting with Hospice NZ to discuss their financial position and to understand where patient access has been restricted.
“I just unfortunately come back to the challenging environment, we need to make some very difficult choices in around those funding environments across our primary and community, mental health services.”
“We put all of our community at the forefront of decisions we make and palliative care is one of those times in our life where our loved ones are highly vulnerable and the family and communities that look after them are in a highly vulnerable place so it’s not that we weight [palliative people] differently, we just have to make decisions.”
Power said next year’s funding for hospice care is unlikely to change, apart from a potential increase for inflation.