Bloomfield ‘felt the pressure along with the rest of us’

Health workers are thanking Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield for his work stopping the ailing health system from collapsing in the pandemic – and for saving lives.

Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield. (Source: rnz.co.nz)

They say they can relate to him needing a rest.

Bloomfield leaves his job in July, stepping down 12 months early after the huge stress of the past two years.

There are few public servants who have had the same degree of fame.

For two years he has been a regular in the living rooms of the country, particularly in the first lockdown when almost everyone was home tuning in every day to hear news of the Covid-19 threat.

Emergency doctor and chairman of the Council of Medical Colleges John Bonning said Bloomfield had to step up to communicate with the public in a role that would normally have been done by politicians.

He exuded trust and had stellar public health credentials, as a medical doctor who had worked for the World Health Organization and headed a DHB, Bonning said.

He engaged and communicated very regularly with health worker groups.

“He felt the pain, he felt the pressure along with the rest of us,” he said.

Frontline GP and chairman of the Pacific GP Network Api Talemaitoga said the country was lucky to have a director-general with top public health skills when they were needed most.

That meant Bloomfield understood the practicalities of what had to be done – like limiting numbers, mass masking, vaccination programmes and the importance of communication, he said.

Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said Bloomfield’s advice had been at the heart of the Government’s decision making and he “had saved thousands if not tens of thousands of lives”.

But not everything was perfect under his tenure. There was a blunder that meant high-risk border workers weren’t being routinely tested as promised, criticisms about spread in MIQ facilities, delays at times over testing, and a slow vaccine rollout to Māori.

Te Whānau O Waiapareira chief executive John Tamihere said the director-general had done a decent job but he was uncomfortable with the “idolatry” that had sprung up around him.

He had called Bloomfield out over the past two years on issues like the delays giving Māori health groups autonomy to look after their communities, and of the ministry’s initial failure to hand over health data.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Dr Ashley Bloomfield (Source: 1News)

It would be mean-spirited to criticise Bloomfield on his way out, he said.

He was a highly-paid public servant who had done a decent job, particularly for mainstream New Zealand, but his copybook was not completely clean, Tamihere said.

“But … Mr Bloomfield will go down as leading a great result when compared with other nations,” he said.

Pacific health groups had shared the concerns about not initially being able to lead the response for their communities, who bore the brunt of early waves of the virus.

GP Api Talemaitoga said while that was frustrating, he and his colleagues on the frontline were not always privy to the big picture Bloomfield was dealing with “in terms of the whole country, the ministry, and his political masters”.

Senior emergency doctor Kate Allan represents the College of Emergency Medicine and said Bloomfield inherited a broken health system but led a response that stopped it from collapsing under the weight of Covid-19.

“I take my hat off to him. I think it’s been an amazing job and an incredibly difficult job and I can’t imagine how tired he must be,” she said.

Bloomfield is, in turn, quick to credit people like Allan who worked on the frontline to battle the virus.