New Zealand's post-2008 health system reforms: toward re-centralization of organizational arrangements

The election of a centre-right government in 2008 has spawned a series of ongoing reforms to the structures for governing New Zealand's health system. These mainly involve creation of a series of new national agencies designed to stimulate national coordination and centralization of some planning and service delivery functions along with performance improvements in specific areas, namely quality, information technology, service efficiency, reduction of administrative costs, and comparative-effectiveness research. This brief article provides an overview of the post-2008 reforms. It notes that, while there appears to be agreement within the health system that the reforms are moving in the right direction, the new institutional arrangements are perhaps overly complicated.