Robert MacCulloch
Robert MacCulloch is a native of New Zealand and worked at the Reserve Bank of NZ before travelling to the UK to complete a PhD in Economics at Oxford University.
Pharmac has not been performing well – no small matter when every Kiwi’s life depends on it. [...] CEO, Sarah Fitt, has resigned, as confirmed by Pharmac’s board chair Paula Bennett.
As a general rule, to prescribe a drug, you must be a NZ registered medical practitioner. Neither Bennett nor Fitt are, or ever have been, so it’s unlikely that, between the two of them, they have ever done so. So the health of the nation has been put into the hands of two people – in charge of buying every drug we use – with neither of them being a doctor who has ever written prescriptions on a day-to-day basis.
Bennett is a former real estate agent and got her job, it strongly appears, due to her links to National. Fitt has a bachelor’s degree in the UK in pharmacology, not medicine. How come in Wellington the people at the top are not the right people? As several Kiwi industrialist-owners have told me, “when you have the wrong person at the top, nothing will ever work”.
It’s not the small fish in NZ who are problem: it’s the big fish who should’ve never got the jobs they’re sitting in and won’t go. The PM should’ve never allowed the 20 to 30 names I’ve now accumulated to have been planted into the biggest jobs in the country when better hires were available.
This article was originally published by Down to Earth Kiwi.
