Relax Hokianga

15/10/2026

What is the cost when device harm goes unrecognised?

03/10/2026

Match Disciplinary Report: Second-Half Bookings & VAR Reviews

The referee’s whistle has blown again in the Health Policy Derby.

Following a review of pitch-side conduct, several more key administrators, Ministers, and professional bodies have been summoned to the touchline for their handling of medical device injuries, patient care, and institutional accountability.

Red Cards (Direct Ejections to the Sin Bin)

🟥 RANZCOG (The Specialist College)

Offense: The Egregious "Hospital Pass" & Passing the Buck

Match Incident: Demanding that Health NZ take sole responsibility for providing information, pathways, and support to patients injured by devices (like Essure and pelvic mesh) that RANZCOG's own specialists selected, promoted, and implanted.

Referee’s Verdict: Straight Red Card for Unsporting Conduct. In football, executing a deliberate "hospital pass"—setting up a teammate to take a devastating hit while washing your hands of the ball—gets you sent off. Implanting permanent devices without established explant pathways, and then demanding the public health system handle the clinical fallout and patient communication, is the ultimate institutional pass-the-buck.

🟥 Minister for ACC

Offense: Defensive Handball in the Penalty Area & Goalpost Relocation

Match Incident: Overseeing a statutory framework that functions as a shield for clinicians and manufacturers against civil liability, while allowing ACC to use "inherent risk" clauses to turn away device-injured women.

Referee’s Verdict: Red Card. Defining a predictable device failure or recalled implant as a "known procedural risk" so ACC can avoid funding long-term rehabilitation, housing modifications, or psychological support is a blatant foul inside the 18-yard box.

Yellow Cards (Booked & Placed on a Final Warning)

​🟨 Health & Disability Commissioner (HDC)
​
Offense: Soft Officiating, Weak Process & Whistle-Phobia
​
Match Incident: Handling serious patient complaints about medical gaslighting, consent breaches, and device complications with slow, undisciplined processes that routinely result in minor administrative slaps-on-the-wrist rather than systemic accountability.

​Referee’s Verdict: Yellow Card. When the body tasked with protecting patient rights shows zero desire to take a firm stand against powerful medical colleges or enforce real consequences, they are simply refusing to blow the whistle on dangerous play.

​🟨 Health Quality & Safety Commission (HQSC)

​Offense: Comatose on the Field & Active Avoidance of Play
​
Match Incident: Wandering around the midfield completely asleep while high-risk medical device harms cascade across the country, doing their absolute best to avoid getting anywhere near the ball or taking charge of system safety.
​
Referee’s Verdict: Yellow Card (and checked for a concussion). An organisation with "Quality and Safety" in its title cannot lie comatose on the pitch while patients carry the physical cost of unmonitored medical device failures.

🟨 Health New Zealand (Te Whatu Ora)

Offense: Obstruction via Bureaucratic Maze

Match Incident: Dragging out the implementation of multidisciplinary care teams, specialized explant pathways, and national device registries, leaving injured patients trapped in regional postcode lotteries.

Referee’s Verdict: Yellow Card. As the operational manager of the pitch, allowing long waitlists, fragmented district health communication, and a lack of specialized surgical capacity to stall patient recovery constitutes severe tactical obstruction.

🟨 Ministry of Health (The Policy Executive)

Offense: Chronic Policy Inertia & Pitch Neglect

Match Incident: Managing policy via endless "roundtables," "progress trackers," and "consultation frameworks" while leaving Medsafe operating under the pre-digital Medicines Act 1981.

Referee’s Verdict: Yellow Card. Conducting decades of reviews without enacting mandatory adverse event reporting or real-time device registries means the league executive is allowing dangerous play to continue unchecked.

🟨 Minister for Women

Offense: Missing in Action on Gendered Harm

Match Incident: Remaining silent at the Cabinet table while device injuries—which overwhelmingly affect women and involve documented medical misogyny, clinical gaslighting, and welfare partner-income exclusions—are treated as minor "operational health matters."

Referee’s Verdict: Yellow Card. When a health crisis disproportionately dismantles the physical, financial, and social autonomy of women across Aotearoa, the Minister holding the Women's portfolio cannot stay on the bench.

🟨 Minister for Mental Health

Offense: Failure to Field Emergency Support

Match Incident: Completely ignoring the severe psychological trauma, C-PTSD, and suicidal ideation caused by chronic device pain and institutional medical gaslighting.

Referee’s Verdict: Yellow Card. Leaving device-injured patients with zero funded, trauma-informed mental health pathways while they fight the health system and ACC for basic recognition is a total failure of sideline medical support.

Updated Match Summary
With RANZCOG and the Minister for ACC receiving straight red cards, and Health NZ, the Ministry, the Minister for Women, and the Minister for Mental Health all booked on yellow cards, the entire governance bench is now operating under severe disciplinary pressure.
Until the upcoming Medical Products Bill delivers mandatory national registries, pre-market removal pathways, and uncoupled ACC restorative cover, the officials remain under intense scrutiny from injured patients and advocates in the stands.

03/10/2026

Given that health—and women’s health in particular—is constantly treated as a political football in Aotearoa, it’s time to blow the whistle and analyze how the play stacks up so far. ⚽️📋

​Welcome to the Half-Time Round-Up of the Health Policy Derby.

​If we were handing out penalties, sending politicians to the sin bin, and issuing red cards for dangerous play, reckless tackling, and deliberate time-wasting on medical device safety... who gets sent off, who gets booked, and who gets a final warning?

​Here is the official Match Disciplinary Report on our MPs, Health Ministers, and medical institutions. 👇

Match Disciplinary Report: The Health Policy Derby

Taking the field in the long-running fixture of New Zealand Health Policy, the referee has been forced to blow the whistle after decades of missed tackles, dangerous obstruction, and blatant time-wasting on medical device safety.

Here is the official disciplinary review for the Ministers, MPs, and institutional referees involved in handling device injuries, regulatory oversight, and patient care.

Red Cards (Immediate Ejections to the Sin Bin)

🟥 Winston Peters & NZ First

Offense: Dangerous Tackle on Comprehensive Regulation & Retrograde Time Travel

Match Incident: Naming the repeal of the Therapeutic Products Act 2023 as a non-negotiable coalition condition, effectively kicking the medical device regulatory framework back to 1981 under the legacy Medicines Act.

Referee’s Verdict: Straight Red Card. While the opposition was focused on natural health supplements, throwing out the entire legislative architecture for high-risk medical devices—without a fully drafted, active replacement on the pitch—left injured patients playing on a pitch with no boundaries or post-market goalposts.

🟥 The Legacy Ministers of Health (David Clark, Andrew Little, Ayesha Verrall, Chris Hipkins)

Offense: Tactical Time-Wasting in the Penalty Box

Match Incident: Taking over six years, a formal petition, and a painstaking restorative justice process just to acknowledge the full extent of pelvic mesh injuries, only to pass the replacement safety legislation in the dying minutes of the 2023 parliamentary term.

Referee’s Verdict: Red Card (Two Yellows Accumulated). By dragging their feet on mandatory implant registries and failing to fix ACC’s "Treatment Injury" loopholes during two full terms of government, they allowed the "small numbers" to compound across sequential device generations while patients carried the physical and financial cost.

Yellow Cards (Booked & On a Final Warning)

🟨 Simeon Brown & Shane Reti (Current Health Portfolio Leadership)

Offense: Unfair Reliance on Overseas Officials & Failure to Track

Match Incident: Prioritising fast-track overseas recognition models (relying on FDA and European approvals) over establishing immediate, mandatory domestic implant registries and local post-market surveillance.

Referee’s Verdict: Yellow Card. Delegating player safety entirely to foreign referees (the FDA and EU) while leaving domestic tracking dependent on voluntary reporting means safety signals will continue to be missed locally. They remain on a final warning pending the introduction and strength of the upcoming Medical Products Bill.

🟨 Gynaecological Specialist Colleges (Leadership)

Offense: Dangerous Play (Adopting Equipment Without Rollback Plans)

Match Incident: Rapidly adopting Class III permanent implants (Essure coils, pelvic mesh kits) on manufacturer promises, but failing to develop or mandate standardised surgical removal pathways and multidisciplinary rehabilitation before widespread deployment.

Referee’s Verdict: Yellow Card for unsporting conduct. In enterprise technology, deploying a product without an exfiltration plan gets you fired; in medicine, it gets written off as an "unfortunate complication."

VAR Review: The Officials Under Scrutiny

MedSafe (The Assistant Ref on the Touchline): VAR Check Pending.

Booked for standing on the sideline with a raised flag that nobody can see. Operating the WAND database as a passive notification clearinghouse rather than an active referee on the field means foul play is only spotted years after the damage is done.

ACC (The Match Commissar): Booked for Systemic Obstruction.

Using the "inherent risk" clause in the ACC Act to deny cover whenever a device failure mode becomes documented in a manufacturer's insert. Redefining a predictable device failure as a "known risk" to avoid paying for holistic rehabilitation is an egregious dive in the penalty area.

The Pitch Summary
The match remains deadlocked in extra time. Until Parliament passes a Medical Products Bill with mandatory registries, explicit exfiltration protocols, and full ACC restorative coverage, the players on the field are playing without adequate safety gear—and the fans in the stands (the patients) are left paying for the damage.

27/09/2026

Enough Already!

Nine Years of Silence: Why the Government Must Stop Ignoring Essure-Injured Women

Women have a right to know when something goes wrong, and to be cared for when it does.

Nine years since the Essure device recall, women remain uninformed. Discover the call for action and necessary steps for their care.

17/09/2026

As a result of the petition, a team within the HealthNZ was set up to consider next steps in assisting women
harmed by Essure, and they engaged with Essure
injured women/wāhine and the Auckland Women’s Health Council.
Despite high hopes that HealthNZ was taking
this issue seriously and was actually going to do
something for the women/wāhine whose health has been destroyed by Essure, everything has gone quiet. When I emailed the leaders of the Health New Zealand - Te Whatu Ora Essure team recently to get an update on progress, no-one bothered to reply!"

Women are still coming forward with stories of harm and struggles of being taken seriously by doctors and gynaecologists.

Simeon Brown MP Casey Costello MP Paul Hunt - Chief Human Rights Commissioner David Seymour RNZ Chris Lynch Winston Peters Nicola Grigg MP when are these women going to get a fair response from our health system?

𝐖𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧'𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡 𝐢𝐧 𝐍𝐙 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝, 𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭!
It is pretty clear that women’s health simply doesn’t matter to the Government, health policy and decision makers, and those who hold the health system purse strings. The issues described in our feature article on the failures of the National Cervical Screening Programme are just the “tip of the iceberg” and epitomise the lack of attention paid to women’s health; the lack of priority placed on women’s health.

Read more in the August September Newsletter:
https://tinyurl.com/bdcjs4by

Mesh harm, Essure harm, far too many women are on long waiting lists for specialist appointments, especially gynae-oncology, and there is a significant shortage of women’s health specialists. For example, the only gynae-oncologist in the Wellington region left in November 2024, and with no plan to fill that vacancy, women/wāhine from the Wellington region now have to travel to Christchurch for surgical treatment.

The ways in which women’s health in Aotearoa New Zealand is underfunded, unrecognised and treated as irrelevant or invisible gets longer every week.

Despite women living longer than men, “women spend 25% more of their lives in debilitating health.” In Aotearoa New Zealand, while women/wāhine have a life expectancy of 83.2 years, their health expectancy was only 65.2 years, meaning that on average they spend 18 years in poor health!

We advocated for and got a Women’s Health Strategy under the Pae Ora (Health Futures) Act 2022. But where is it? What has it done for us?

When is HealthNZ, the Ministry of Health, and whichever parties are in government at any given time, going to give us what was promised – a health system that works for women!

15/09/2026

𝐖𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧'𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡 𝐢𝐧 𝐍𝐙 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝, 𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭!
It is pretty clear that women’s health simply doesn’t matter to the Government, health policy and decision makers, and those who hold the health system purse strings. The issues described in our feature article on the failures of the National Cervical Screening Programme are just the “tip of the iceberg” and epitomise the lack of attention paid to women’s health; the lack of priority placed on women’s health.

Read more in the August September Newsletter:
https://tinyurl.com/bdcjs4by

Mesh harm, Essure harm, far too many women are on long waiting lists for specialist appointments, especially gynae-oncology, and there is a significant shortage of women’s health specialists. For example, the only gynae-oncologist in the Wellington region left in November 2024, and with no plan to fill that vacancy, women/wāhine from the Wellington region now have to travel to Christchurch for surgical treatment.

The ways in which women’s health in Aotearoa New Zealand is underfunded, unrecognised and treated as irrelevant or invisible gets longer every week.

Despite women living longer than men, “women spend 25% more of their lives in debilitating health.” In Aotearoa New Zealand, while women/wāhine have a life expectancy of 83.2 years, their health expectancy was only 65.2 years, meaning that on average they spend 18 years in poor health!

We advocated for and got a Women’s Health Strategy under the Pae Ora (Health Futures) Act 2022. But where is it? What has it done for us?

When is HealthNZ, the Ministry of Health, and whichever parties are in government at any given time, going to give us what was promised – a health system that works for women!

14/09/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DoDXwqwGD/

04/09/2026

Health New Zealand - Te Whatu Ora 9 years after recall and MedSafes request for patient minitoring, women should not be having to educate every medical practitioner and nurse they interact with about Essure.

Why has the medical profession as a whole still not been provided information that makes them aware of this device, its potential issues and the need for health monitoring.

Women are still fighting for health care that recognises and understands the complications of this device.

Simeon Brown MP Casey Costello MP David Seymour Nicola Grigg MP Winston Peters
this is not health care, at this stage it is simply state sanctioned medical negligence and abuse.

Woman's Day NZ New Zealand Woman's Weekly RNZ nzherald.co.nz this is a classic example of our health system gaslighting and ignoring women's health. Is this the benchmark for care in New Zealand?

13/08/2026

There are many Herbert Greens in modern gynaecology.

Decades after the Cartwright Inquiry, it’s painfully clear that the profession learned nothing from the experiment that created the HDC — and the HDC has forgotten why it exists.

Women are still unfairly represented, still dismissed, and still forgotten when
they become unwitting participants in what eventually reveals itself as the moral failings of our health system.

Ethics seem to matter only in research and experimentation. In medical practice, they vanish.

Women harmed by gynaecology lose their health, their ability to work, their security, their futures, their dreams — and sometimes their homes. They wake each morning wondering why they bother, slowly losing the will to go on.

Meanwhile, those who caused the harm carry on without consequence, protected by institutional silence and taxpayer funding.

They do everything possible to ensure ACC cleans up their mess — but never enough to ensure the women they harmed receive the care they deserve.

This is what systemic failure looks like. This is what institutional amnesia costs. And this is why women are still being harmed in Aotearoa New Zealand.

30/06/2026

The "Small Number" That Changs Lives
Why We Need Real Accountability in Gynaecology.

We’re told the risks are rare. We’re told it’s "just a small number." But when you are one of the women harmed by medical devices like Essure, you know the truth: those statistics are used to hide reality, not explain it.

​In New Zealand, the barrier to care isn’t just the injury—it’s the systemic refusal to acknowledge it.

​Too many specialists are unwilling to complete the paperwork for adverse events. By keeping these injuries off the record, the system effectively blocks us from accessing the ACC support and mental health care we desperately need.

​The cycle is broken - paperwork is often completed in ways that favor the provider, not the patient - complications are ignored, leaving us to navigate chronic pain without relevant, funded care - and consequently, the trust we place in those who claim to "help" is shattered, creating a legacy of mistrust that spans families and communities.

​This attitude doesn’t protect the medical profession; it damages it. By hiding the truth, they are actively choosing to stay out of touch with the reality of women's lives.

Gynaecology needs better, independent regulation to protect women. We need transparency, not damage control.
​If you or someone you know has been dismissed by the health system after a procedure, you are not a statistic. Your story matters. It’s time to demand a health system that prioritizes patients over reputation.

​