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If you have half an hour to spare, go to www.waikatodhb.govt.nz and roam around the cluttered website "Waikato District Health Board - Caring for You." It will be of particular interest if you happen to live in the area and you are one of the 365,730 people that this body looks after. The figures supplied are getting better all the time and it is moving into more and more new fields. The Board has 6,000 employees; it had 4,800 in 2001. The budget this year is $1.1 billion dollars, over double that of ten years ago.
The Annual Report confirms that the Board last year arranged 142,368 mental health community visits, and about the same number of district nurse community visits. There were thousands of outpatient visits, but we note the 20,724 "did not attends," and they are estimated to have cost the Board $3.11 million.
Click on "Meet the Team." This site has nothing to do with doctors or nurses, but there you will learn that "effective communication is central to good management practice and crucial to building and maintaining public confidence." The...