Chief Executive Wayne Naylor recently met with Health New Zealand’s Executive Leadership Team to share an overview of hospice care across Aotearoa and discuss how we can work together to strengthen palliative care for New Zealanders.
Wayne began by acknowledging the important progress made this year and thanking Health NZ for the 2026/27 funding uplift, including the targeted $8.8 million increase for hospice services.
A central message to Health NZ leaders was simple: helping people to die well is an essential part of a good health system, and hospice is core health system infrastructure
Wayne also reinforced an important reality about how hospice care is funded.
Money raised by communities is not simply paying for the “extras”. It helps fund the core services people rely on, including the clinical teams providing specialist palliative care.
Making the national model work
Wayne’s message to Health NZ was simple, that implementing new National Model for Integrated Adult Palliative Care will be stronger if hospices are deeply involved in planning, costing, service specifications, workforce design and regional implementation.
Wayne proposed three practical actions:
- Ensure Hospice New Zealand and hospice representation is at the table in phase two.
- Create a joint technical work programme to bring together service specifications, hospice data, costing information and analysis of service gaps so there is a shared understanding of what services are needed and what they cost.
- Plan the transition together to develop a staged sustainability and workforce pathway so funding, pay parity, access to care and implementation of the new model progress together.
Hospice New Zealand brings national connections, strong sector data, detailed knowledge of service costs and, through hospices themselves, deep understanding of the communities they serve. We are ready to work alongside Health NZ to help translate the national model from policy into care that can be delivered consistently and sustainably across the motu.
Adding your voice to help keep palliative care part of the national conversation
These conversations with health leaders matter. So does the wider public conversation about the kind of care we want available to people and whānau at the end of life.
Ahead of Election 2026, Hospice New Zealand is sharing its palliative care priorities with political parties and giving New Zealanders practical ways to ask MPs and candidates where they stand on the future of palliative care.
If dying well matters to you, you can add your voice and help keep palliative care part of the national conversation.