Health

There has been a lot of debate in the past about if PPNZ is a single issue part, a core values party, or a broad platform, or some mix of all three.

As I mentioned above, I sourced the quote about PPNZ not being a single-issue party from the Party's own, official, public-facing website, from the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) section. If that cannot be relied upon to be an accurate representation of the current disposition of the Party, then what can be?

At PPNZ's current (barely alive) status it would not take too many stubborn members (less than you could count on one hand) and they could push through absolutely any ludicrous proposal they wish.

That sounds to me like you're not particularly in favour of the "Three Pirate Rule", a fundamental precept of swarm management. In my view, policy is not set in concrete, and is subject to change if enough members vote against it. All policy statements should have a mandatory review period, and should be able to be challenged even before such a period expires if sufficient members deem it necessary. If any three pirates in agreement can create a workgroup that establishes a proposal for a new policy to be voted upon by the membership (of whatever size), then any three pirates in agreement can also establish a workgroup to see that the previous policy gets brought back before the membership (of whatever size) for review. That's the way I see it working. I may be wrong on this.

I'm starting to have second thoughts on the issue. I think there are merits to using alternate delivery methods IE salt. It is easily possible for individuals to consume more than the daily requirement of fluoride through alternate food sources if fluoride is added to water. By adding fluoride to water we remove the one thing that people could easily use to control their own fluoride consumption.

I buy iodised salt and I would buy fluoridated salt as I think my diet is insufficient in both. I think the Pirates could support looking at alternate delivery methods. Using salt is less efficient and will cost the country more in dental bills but taxpayers seemed to have rationalised this in Europe.

On a completely unrelated (but still Health-related) issue, I'd like to mention that I'm attending a consumer workshop this week, on the subject of establishing electronic health records in Auckland. Similar to the current discussions about electronic voting, there are considerable privacy and security issues involved in any such plan, which I intend to challenge the organisers on. I'm attaching the invitation which I received. RSVP's have now closed, sorry, although I'd welcome any input from other pirates here on questions we should be asking at the workshop.

If we are still looking at working collaboratively with the Internet Party, this is one subject we could conceivably work together on, IMHO.

I've just come back from the NEHR Consumer Workshop. It was interesting to hear that, in light of recent high-profile public-sector IT failures in NZ, there were more questions put to the facilitators today about privacy and security issues than about functionality and implementation.

One of the most chilling things I heard today was that (and I'm paraphrasing here) placing our medical records online will not make them any less secure than they are now. Just think about that for a minute and let it sink in. The implication here is that our confidential medical records are currently at risk of being divulged, either by malicious intent or unintentional leaks.

At present the NEHR project is in the very early stages of scoping, and putting together of a business case as a proposal. There has been no firm decision made on a particular vendor to provide the service, although a live (but currently closed) demo is available from one prospective vendor. In fact, there is not even a firm decision to go ahead with the project at all, yet. The project team is expecting to outsource the online service from a third-party, and the software package will be proprietary, as there are no known open source electronic health record systems in the world at present, to the knowledge of the project team, and it is a highly specialised field.

Should the project get the go-ahead from the Government, it will become mandatory, under an implied consent model, and everybody within the catchment area will end up having their health records available online. There will be privacy and permission controls available, and consumers / patients will be able to determine who has access to their records. There will be an audit trail so all access to our EHR file can be tracked.

It is my opinion that there are still a lot of privacy and security questions to be resolved before any such system goes live. However, it seems to me that these questions cannot / will not get answered until it is too late to back out.