Minister of Health - The Machinion Post

A pharmacist prescribing plan may ease the GP crisis or worsen it. The Minister has not yet said which.

ToHon. Simeon Brown, Minister of HealthNational

General Practitioners Aotearoa has come out against a proposal from ACT to widen the scope of what pharmacists may prescribe, calling it a red flag for a health system already under strain. It is worth noting plainly, before anything else, that this is a proposal at this stage and not settled Government policy. What has been made public so far, in the reporting this newspaper has seen, does not set out the detail: which medicines, which conditions, what training would be required of pharmacists, or how a pharmacy's records would speak to a patient's GP file, if at all. A column that pretended to know these things would be inventing them.

What is genuinely at stake is not small. Patients in many parts of the country, and Maori and Pacific patients disproportionately, wait weeks for a GP appointment that used to take days. A pharmacy, by contrast, is often open on a Saturday and does not require a booking. If pharmacists could safely treat more of the common, minor complaints that clog GP waiting rooms, that would free general practice for the complex and continuing care only it can give. This is the strongest case for the ACT proposal, and it should not be dismissed as it has been dismissed elsewhere: the country has, in fact, a primary care access crisis, and pretending otherwise serves no one.

But the GPs' objection deserves an equally honest hearing. Continuity of care, one clinician who knows a patient's history, is not a nicety; it catches the second illness hiding behind the first, and it matters most for the very patients who already receive the least of it. Widen prescribing without wiring pharmacy and general practice together, and without training and resourcing pharmacists properly for the new duties asked of them, and the result is not more capacity. It is the same congestion, moved to a different door. The Minister of Health, Simeon Brown, faces the sound temptation to treat this as a low-cost fix to a workforce shortage that has resisted every other remedy. It is not low-cost if it is done without evidence, and the country cannot yet see that evidence because it has not been shown.

Recommended to the minister

Commission and publish an independent assessment of pharmacist workforce capacity, training needs, and clinical safety before any expansion proceeds.
Require that any extension of prescribing power be tied to a working system for sharing patient records between pharmacy and general practice.
Set the timetable for this decision by the evidence of patient benefit, not by the arithmetic of the governing arrangement.

Minister of HealthIn support

The Government should count Long Covid properly and let sufferers use the disability support system already built for them

ToHon. Simeon Brown, Minister of HealthNational

Filed 11 Aug. 2026On: Long Covid sufferers call on politicians to do more to help those with the disease (rnz-political)

Wellington, Aug. 11 - People living with Long Covid have asked for two things: better data on the disease, and access to the disability support services that already exist for other long-term conditions. Neither request is large. Neither is free, and neither ought to be dismissed as small.

The case for the Minister of Health, Simeon Brown, to resist is not without substance. Long Covid remains, in the medical literature, an ill-defined condition, with symptoms that overlap other chronic illnesses and no settled diagnostic test. A register built on a diagnosis this soft risks becoming a register of very little, and money spent chasing precise numbers for an imprecise illness could instead go to conditions better understood and more clearly proven. The Ministry has finite capacity, and this newspaper has argued before that new spending must be weighed against the primary care access crisis already before the country. That case deserves a hearing, not a wave of the hand.

But it does not hold. A country cannot plan for a burden of illness it refuses to measure, and the absence of data has not made Long Covid disappear; it has only made the cost of it invisible to the officials who must eventually pay for it, whether in hospital admissions, lost work, or in claims on the benefit system further down the track. Sufferers are not asking for a new bureaucracy. They are asking to be let into disability support arrangements that already exist, staffed and funded, for people with long-term conditions of comparable severity. Refusing that access on the ground that the underlying disease is hard to define is not caution; it is a decision by omission, and one that falls, as these decisions usually do, hardest on those least able to argue their own case through the system.

The Minister need not settle every scientific question about Long Covid before Cabinet acts on what is already known: that it exists, that it disables people for months and sometimes years, and that the country currently keeps no proper account of either fact.

Recommended to the minister

Direct Health New Zealand to establish a consistent method of recording Long Covid diagnoses and disability, even an imperfect one, rather than none.
Instruct officials to clarify, within months rather than years, how existing disability support criteria apply to Long Covid sufferers.
Report to Parliament on the fiscal and workforce implications of that access before the next Budget, so the cost is known rather than assumed.

Correspondence for Hon. Simeon Brown, Minister of Health

A pharmacist prescribing plan may ease the GP crisis or worsen it. The Minister has not yet said which.

The Government should count Long Covid properly and let sufferers use the disability support system already built for them