Meeting with the Health Minister

Last week I had the opportunity to represent members at a meeting with Health Minister the Hon Shane Reti.

It’s PSNZ’s role to advocate on behalf of members to achieve the workforce and system level changes needed to realise the huge potential you have to offer our health system and the people who are served by it.

I take that responsibility seriously, and it will continue to be a focus throughout my presidency.

The Minister was most interested to learn more about our profession and the contribution pharmacists and technicians can make to improving health outcomes. 

The key messages I shared with the Minister included that PSNZ represents one of the largest health workforce groups in Aotearoa New Zealand and that we are an umbrella organisation with our membership comprising pharmacists and technicians working in community, general practice, hospital, and non-patient settings throughout the country.

We have responsibility for training the next generation of pharmacists and Pharmacy Accuracy Checking Technicians (PACTs) with Health New Zealand training contracts for our Intern Training Programme (ITP) and pharmacy accuracy checking technicians (PACTs).

I emphasised to the Minister that the pharmacist and technician workforces have significant untapped potential to improve the quality of care provided to our populations and help meet patient’s health outcomes.

At the same time, I also raised with him some of the priorities PSNZ has identified to enable this potential to be realized.

That includes getting more New Zealand students to choose pharmacy as a degree, continuing to develop the technician workforce and to have a renewed focus on the distribution of pharmacy services to ensure they can be provided to high needs, provincial and rural populations.

The Minister indicated he is looking to PSNZ to come back to him and officials with initiatives that will continue to contribute to better health outcomes. This will be a focus of the strategy development that is now underway within PSNZ.

We see this work sitting alongside the other priorities I’ve mentioned. We have a young, dynamic workforce that wants to do more across all settings.

I want PSNZ to be at the forefront of representing the profession and enabling sustainable change that is good for our members and good for patients and communities.

Michael Hammond - PSNZ President