A Balanced Approach to Healthcare: Collaboration, Not Division, is Key
Chris White – CEO Southern Cross Healthcare
Like many countries around the world, New Zealand’s healthcare system is under pressure. One-way Kiwis can access quality care when and where they need it is through closer partnership between the public and private sectors.
Private healthcare has long played an important part in contributing to the New Zealand health system, particularly for elective surgery. Private hospitals like Southern Cross Healthcare help to sustain it by increasing capacity and ensuring more people receive timely treatment.
Southern Cross Healthcare is the key subsidiary of the Southern Cross Health Trust, a charitable trust with the primary purpose to give more New Zealanders access to timely, affordable and quality private healthcare. We achieve this via our nationwide network of owned and partner hospitals, specialist centres, diagnostic services, and community-based health and wellness providers.
We reinvest 100% of our profits into improving our facilities, expanding services and technologies enhancing patient care and ensuring that any surplus benefits New Zealanders directly.
In the last financial year alone, Southern Cross Healthcare provided care to more than 100,000 patients across our network from Whangārei to Invercargill. Additionally, our subsidiaries and joint venture partnerships in rehabilitation, physiotherapy, mental health, and workplace health services supported the health outcomes of more than 90,000 New Zealanders.
A significant portion of these patients were funded by Health New Zealand - Te Whatu Ora and ACC, demonstrating that access to private healthcare is not just for those who can afford it, and the crucial role it plays in supporting the entire health system.
Claims that private hospitals lure doctors away from public hospitals with financial incentives and leave complex cases to the public system ignore broader challenges in the health system such as workforce recruitment and retention, increasing demand and rising costs.
Such criticism also overlooks the collaborative potential of public-private partnerships (PPPs). For a small country like ours, PPPs offer an opportunity to pool resources and expertise, creating efficiencies and expanding capacity in ways that benefit everyone.
Southern Cross Healthcare, with its nationwide infrastructure, expertise, and commitment to reinvesting in its services and facilities, is well-positioned to play a leading role in these types of partnerships – with an emphasis of partnership, rather than privatisation.
Instead of focusing on division, we should be looking at how collaboration can deliver better outcomes for all New Zealanders.
Take elective surgeries as an example. Long wait times are a concern, particularly for those requiring joint replacements or other non-urgent procedures. Southern Cross Healthcare, with its national reach, works with the public sector to reduce these backlogs, freeing up public hospitals to focus on urgent and complex cases.
Critics also argue that private healthcare deepens inequity, particularly for Māori and Pasifika communities, who are underrepresented in private insurance coverage. This is a legitimate concern, but it’s not one the private sector is ignoring.
Private healthcare organisations can play an important role in supporting the population’s capacity and service access needs. Southern Cross Healthcare already actively identifies underserved regions and populations, investing in facilities, and initiatives to address unmet needs, including a growing charitable surgery programme. We also recruit surgeons and anaesthetists to provincial areas that would otherwise struggle to get specialists, another way that we can address inconsistent access to care around the country
A PPP model could be a promising way to address equity gaps and expand access to care without compromising quality or affordability.
For the Government, entering a PPP with an organisation like Southern Cross Healthcare means any funding and surplus is reinvested back into the system – and not extracted as shareholder profits, or sent offshore. This ensures a sustainable approach to expanding healthcare access while maintaining quality and affordability.
New Zealand’s healthcare challenges require practical solutions in the short term and strategic ones in the medium to long term. Public hospitals will always be the backbone of our healthcare system, but the private sector provides flexibility, innovation, and additional capacity that the public system alone cannot deliver.
By working together, we can build a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable healthcare system for all New Zealanders.
We deserve nothing less.
