A health minister should not get to declare the system healthy while patients are still trying to get an appointment with it.

New Zealand’s Simeon Brown says healthcare is improving. The Guardian reports shortages, long waits and clinicians warning that safe care is being compromised. Brown points to better immunization rates, improved elective-surgery waits and three-quarters of emergency patients being seen within six hours.

I’m glad those measures are moving. I would be even happier if “within six hours” did not sound like the delivery estimate for a refrigerator.

This is the problem with ministerial reassurance: it often arrives in a form that cannot examine you.

Brown acknowledges that too many people are waiting too long. That is important. But acknowledgment is becoming the most generously staffed department in public services. There is always someone available to confirm that there should have been someone available.

The Guardian reports that only 54 additional full-time nurses had been hired since the government took office, against 2,000 promised by the minister.

Fifty-four is a number. Two thousand is also a number. The relationship between them is not a rounding error; it is an excellent reason to bring a calculator to the next press conference.

You cannot staff a hospital with the ambition to staff a hospital.

Nor should the answer be to ask the existing workforce to keep becoming more heroic. Healthcare professionals already know how to work hard. A government that repeatedly relies on their extraordinary effort has not discovered efficiency. It has discovered people who are reluctant to abandon patients.

That is a rotten thing to build a staffing model around.

The article describes nurses and doctors leaving for Australia, where they say pay can be substantially better. New Zealand’s leaders might consider competing for those workers with more than the emotional appeal of being needed desperately.

Most employees prefer appreciation that can participate in their rent.

This is not an argument that every problem began with the current coalition. Chronic pressures predate it, and Brown says purchases from private hospitals are providing 40,000 extra elective surgeries. If those arrangements get someone needed treatment sooner, good. Patients should not have to wait while the rest of us settle an ideological tournament.

But temporary purchasing cannot be the whole answer to a public system losing the people who make it function.

I want parties to compete on retaining staff, making primary care affordable and giving graduate nurses actual jobs. Show the funding, the hiring and the timetable. Then report what happened, including the bits that would look less attractive behind a podium.

Labour is proposing three free GP visits, funded by a targeted capital gains tax, and guaranteed jobs for graduate nurses. Those are proposals, not appointments already booked. They deserve scrutiny—and at least they recognize that access requires more than a minister insisting the machinery is making encouraging noises.

The relevant question is not whether the government can find an improving indicator. It is whether a person needing care can find someone to provide it.

Until then, save the congratulations.

The waiting room has plenty of room for those.