One emerged last Friday when it was revealed that more than 30 Waitākere Hospital staff declined to care for a racially abusive patient to force hospital managers to defuse the situation.
The man had asked for white-only staff and made racist and sexual remarks to Filipino and Pacific Island staff over several weeks.
Such behaviour is beyond the pale. The patient eventually co-operated when told he could be discharged or referred to police.
Types of dementia and brain injuries can cause entirely inappropriate behaviour, and staff might well understand such situations. This patient was deemed mentally competent.
In another case, at North Shore Hospital, a patient asked for no Asian staff for his operation, and the hospital agreed. Not surprisingly, staff were upset.
Patients do, and should, have extensive rights. The consumers’ rights code says patients are entitled to express a preference about who provides their healthcare and have that preference met "where practicable".
That makes sense when, for example, women or men might ask for same-sex clinicians for intimate examinations. The "preference" right, though, conflicts in those other instances with basic rights and protections for staff.
In any event, our medical facilities have become multicultural mixing places. They rely on, and are enriched by, staff from many lands. Patients who try to proscribe by ethnic background could well find no-one is available to treat them.
One significant advantage is the presence of staff on hand to better understand — and sometimes even translate for — patients from different lands.
Yet, memos to staff at Christchurch and Waikato Hospitals have sparked accusations of racism and discrimination for insisting on the use of only English in all clinical settings. At Palmerston North Hospital, Indian nurses have been singled out and told they had to stop speaking Malayalam in public spaces.
Sensibly, Health New Zealand’s chief executive, Margie Apa, clarified matters by saying health professionals should "exercise their professional judgement" on what language to use with patients.
It would also be plain rude and create distrust for staff to speak over a patient in a language unfamiliar to that patient.
It remains unclear what problems led to the edicts. Did patients feel alienated or did clinicians not understand each other? Any such problems should be dealt with when they arise rather than through micromanaging by a distrustful bureaucracy.
New Zealand is becoming increasingly multilingual and multicultural. We should come to expect to hear languages other than English all around us. Allowing for clinical safety and commonsense provisos, our hospitals can lead the way.
David bowls over Goliath
The Black Caps had just been beaten 2-0 by Sri Lanka and turned this around to inflict on India its first home series defeat since 2012. The achievement of winning two remarkable tests under contrasting circumstances is astonishing.
It is like Scotland coming to New Zealand and beating the All Blacks in successive tests.
Unlikely hero 13-wicket haul Mitch Santner probably only played because Michael Bracewell was back home on paternity leave.
The disbelief in the tone of Indian commentators is apparent. How can a minuscule country of five million people topple a cricket-mad nation of 1.4 billion?
