HCA Chief Executive Jon Royal has been busy since joining HCA in May this year. His presentation provided a realistic look at Health Care Aotearoa’s current situation and its opportunities for growth.

“My role is to ensure you continue as best as you can as an organisation called Health Care Aotearoa in a much easier way than you are currently facing,” Jon said.

“We have family health care centres, better sooner more convenient, business cases, clinical leadership. What do these all mean to us as an organisation.”

“Look at the PHO collectives we had 80-90 at one stage we are down to about 32 – let’s hope that’s enough for the time being.”

Current Situation

“We are working through a period of regrouping or re-establishment. We currently have 37 member organisations, 20 are corporate members. We have 68 providers currently on the Te Wana programme.

“We have numerous providers holding social service contracts and we have six youth specific services who are either members of HCA or Te Wana.”

“We recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Community Housing Aotearoa to put their 170 members through the Te Wana programme. We are continuing to have positive and constructive conversations with TPK to put their 25 Whanau ora collectives through Te Wana. It’s all great potential for growth.”

“We have a current contract with the Ministry of Health that has two elements to it – implementing Te Wana and PHO development. We only have three PHOs with HCA at this time so the PHO development part of the contract is likely to go. But we are working with the Ministry to look at other ways to provide value in terms of the direction that they are taking. For example the youth sector, one stop shops and the unregulated workforce.

“There are opportunities for growth through Te Wana, through supporting Youth Services, Alliancing and collectives, and high performing providers.

“We are not fully reliant on government. We are 60% autonomous – a good position to be in. Like Don said yesterday for the bulk of it we’ve got to be our own people and understand what we are about as an organisation and we have to be clear on that.”

Changes needed

Feedback from cluster hui held in Auckland, Christchurch showed the key things that members value is advocacy. “You know the decisions are being made in Wellington you say you need representation there at the highest level.”

“You said you value being part of a national movement, sharing ideas, and being kept in touch with what’s happening across the nation,” he said

Download a pdf copy of the minutes from the Cluster Hui summary

“We need to consider opening up our membership, to change the constitution to reflect more than just the primary health care side of things and to make it quicker to sign up new members.”

“Possible solutions are to form our own National PHO or Management Services Organisations. But we need buy in from you to that.”

Workshop questions and feedback

Jon posed the following questions to the members to discuss in workshops:

1. Do we want to continue as a national organisation?
2. Do we accept constitutional change will benefit HCA?
3. Which fee structure will work best for members?
4. Alliancing – would we be best forming our own formal alliance body e.g. National Primary Health Organisation or Managed Service Organisation.

Workshop groups agreed unanimously that HCA should continue. They endorsed changes to the constitution to widen it up to social sector providers. Feedback around the fee structure was also positive. Participants said they liked the way it was itemised so they knew exactly what they were getting.

They also agreed to investigate the establishment of a National PHO or MSO.