Budget 2026: Health Industry Hopes For Continuation Of Funding Levels

Kate
Green , Health Correspondent

Health
industry groups and experts aren’t expecting great surprises
from
Budget 2026, but they’re hoping for a continuation of
previous levels of funding.

Here’s what a few key
players will be looking for when the documents land on
Thursday.

Primary care looking for a
boost

Royal New Zealand College of GPs president Dr
Luke Bradford said he was hoping for some more funding for
general practice.

“At the moment we spend about six
percent of health spend on primary care – the OECD average
is 14 percent,” he said.

That was leading to two
problems – first, capitation funding (that is, the amount of
money a practice is given by the government per person
enrolled) had not kept up with inflation, increasing the
amount patients themselves had to pay.

Second, wages
in general practice had not kept up with their hospital
counterparts, making recruitment and retention
tricky.

Increasing funding would reduce costs for
patients and improve pay and conditions for staff, which
would make recruitment easier, Bradford said.

“By
investing in general practice, you save the health system
money quite dramatically.”

A report published last
week by public health campaigners Kaitaki Hauora pointed to
primary care as the most effective place for investment –
one health economist described it as “putting things much
further upstream to avoid any kind of downstream
costs”.

Bradford said he was expecting the budget to
be “relatively austere” overall.

“Last year we did see
a movement,” Bradford said. “We did see some shift in that,
but it has not yet tilted the balance for people’s back
pockets and our recruitment drives.”

New medicines,
and keeping the lights on

Patient advocate Dr Malcolm
Mulholland said he would be looking out for new Pharmac
funding, which would determine how many drugs on its list of
options for funding would become available.

“We know
that at the moment the waiting list of medicines that
Pharmac want to fund is over 100, and that will come at an
annual cost of some $250 million to $300 million.”

He
said the government had a mandate to invest more in health –
a recent poll of 1000 people, conducted by market research
company Perceptive for pharmaceutical lobby group Medicines
NZ, showed 55 percent of people ranked the health sector as
the top priority for funding, well ahead of the next most
important, economic development, at 15 percent.

The
other area Mulholland said he’d be looking at closely was
funding for Health NZ.

“A report came out very
recently that said just
to keep the lights on will cost $1.405 billion. Anything
short of that, or any new initiatives without having new
money tagged to it, will actually be a deficit,” he
said.

“We’re very worried about what services in that
situation might be cut.”

That number wasn’t far off
what was forecast in last year’s Budget, which was
$1.37m.

“I would expect that funding to be relatively
the same, but when it comes to Pharmac, I really have no
idea.”

Aged care industry looking for funding grant
for rural facilities

Aged Care Association chief
executive Tracey Martin said she would be looking for
funding to keep the doors open at small, charity-run or
owner-operated aged care homes – particularly in rural
towns.

That would ideally take the form of a new
infrastructure grant fund, over a four-year period, she
said, at a cost of about $680 million over four years ($170
million a year).

“We just had a 40-bed facility close
on Monday,” she said. That was in Levin, run by the
Presbytarian Support Central, trading as Enliven
Central.

That meant the loss of 40 standard beds – the
ones that “people just living on superannuation can
afford”.

An infrastructure grant fund would stabilise
those facilities which were struggling, Martin
said.

She was also looking for the introduction of
admission and discharge fees, covered by the government, for
short-term care residents, because the bed day rates
currently were dependent on people staying for years, not
days or months.

According to a recent report by the
association, funding admission and discharge transaction
costs (on top of the daily bed day rate) would incentivise
providers to accept recovery patients, encouraging the end
goal to be patients returning home, at a cost of $156m over
four years.

Psychiatrists hope for funding to address
workforce shortages

Hiran Thabrew, chairperson of Tū
Te Akaaka Roa, the New Zealand branch of the Royal Australia
and NZ College of Psychiatrists, said they needed more
funding to address their 210 nationwide vacancies and ageing
workforce.

A lot of money had gone into mental health
in the past few years, but most had gone into primary care
and peer support services.

“There’s been relative
neglect of the needs of the specialist workforce,” he
said.

“We’ve seen that reduce over time, and as a
result, there’s been less access for people to specialist
mental health services.”

Any increase would be good,
he said, but specifically they were asking for $6m over five
years to increase the number of psychiatry trainees to
mitigate the effects of retirement on the workforce, and
another $3.5m over three years for 20 extra specialist
training places.

“The current government did increase
funding for new psychiatry trainees,” Thabrew said, but “not
as much as required to meet the impending shortage in the
coming decade”.

College of Emergency Medicine looks
for sustained funding

Michael Connolly, chairperson
of the New Zealand National Council for ACEM (the
Australasian College for Emergency Medicine), said they
wanted the government to focus on health as a priority,
“particularly at a time when EDs are under sustained
increased pressure, often at above at or above
capacity”.

He said he’d like to see an increase in
sustained investment which took a whole-system approach to
ease pressure on EDs, such as community care for mental
health, primary care, aged care facilities and
hospital-in-the home.

How much longer could emergency
medical workers carry on under strain?

“We deal with
constrained environments all the time,” he said.

“But
there’s increasing demonstration that people will reach a
breaking point. There’s the risk of staff going to other
places in the healthcare sector or places
overseas.”

Home carers look for sustainable
funding

Lisa Foster, chief executive of the Home and
Community Health Association, was also hopeful for more
funding.

“I think we’re quite pragmatic about the
environment we’re all facing,” she said – but as a
“preventative, cost-effective solution, we would really like
a commitment to sustainable funding.”

Home care
spanned so many different sectors, agencies and ministries,
and its funding channels included Whaikaha, ACC and Health
NZ.

So rather than a specific fund, she was hoping for
meaningful discussion on how prices were set.

“We can
obviously do more, the more funding that’s
provided.”

They were still working at putting a dollar
figure on it, with work underway to understand how home care
could keep people out of more costly alternatives like
hospitals and rest homes.

“It’s the golden goose,”
Foster said. “You don’t want to starve it.”

Cancer
organisation want more funding for medicines

Ah-Leen
Rayner, Breast Cancer Foundation chief executive, said
they’d be looking for “a meaningful increase in Pharmac’s
budget – one that helps clear Pharmac’s options for
investment list”.

A number of medicines currently on
the list had the potential to save the lives of people with
breast cancer, she said, including Keytruda, Trodelvy,
Abraxane and Enhertu.

“They aren’t untested ideas or
wishlist items, they’re treatments that have been thoroughly
assessed and waiting for funding, and if Pharmac had the
money, they would fund them”.

Funding cancer
medication would also save money on costly treatments and
hospital care in the longterm.

“I’ve tempered
expectations for this budget,” she said.

“The $604m
uplift Pharmac announced in 2024 was an important step and
we know it’s delivered progress, but there’s still a
significant backlog.”

Dentists call for more training
places, wider flouridation

Dr Robin Whyman, director
of dental policy at the Dental Association, said New
Zealand’s only dental school was ready to take more
students, and the government needed to invest in more
training places.

Numbers had not increased since the
1980s, nor had they kept pace with population growth, the
effect of an ageing workforce, or the health needs of an
ageing population.

Clinics were now waiting an average
of six months to fill vacancies, and in some regional areas
it can take close to a year, he said.

Additionally,
the association was calling on the government to commit to
expanding community water fluoridation.

“Prevention is
the cheapest investment there is, and every dollar spent on
fluoridation prevents multiple dollars in future treatment,”
Whyman
said.

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