New Zealand’s 32 hospices are warning they cannot maintain current services without an extra 80 to 100 million dollars a year from government, with chief executives at Wellington’s Mary Potter Hospice and South Auckland’s Totara Hospice saying they have already cut beds, depleted cash reserves and turned patients away.
According to 1News, the sector now needs that additional injection each year to keep delivering palliative care at the level New Zealanders currently expect. Hospices look after people in the final weeks and months of life, supporting families through diagnoses such as advanced cancer, motor neurone disease and end-stage heart failure, and the bulk of that care is delivered free of charge.
Mary Potter Hospice chief executive Tony Paine told 1News that roughly half the hospice’s funding comes from government contracts and the other half from community donations, fundraising and op shop revenue. With donations under pressure as households absorb higher rents, higher food prices and now higher fuel excise, the hospice has begun running down its cash reserves to keep services going. “People are very generous to us even though we know times are tough,” Paine said.
Totara Hospice, which serves east and south Auckland, has gone further and reduced the number of patients it can take. Chief executive Tina McCafferty said the cut means more than 100 patients a year are now being looked after by Middlemore Hospital, GP networks or family at home rather than by hospice teams trained in symptom management at the end of life. “At the end of the day, we can only provide the care that is affordable,” McCafferty told 1News, warning of “an absolutely tangible lack of investment from consecutive governments.” Totara already needs to raise more than 4 million dollars a year from the community on top of its government contract just to keep the doors open.
Health Minister Simeon Brown has acknowledged the strain but defended the government’s record. Brown told RNZ Checkpoint that Health New Zealand had lifted hospice sector funding by 3 percent this year and that officials were in active discussions with Hospice New Zealand about a more sustainable long-term model. Asked directly whether hospices should receive more, Brown answered “absolutely”, but stopped short of committing to anything close to the 80 to 100 million figure the sector says it needs.
The minister can point to one concrete win this month. As part of Budget 2026, Brown committed 15.5 million dollars over four years to stand up two new paediatric palliative care teams, one for the North Island and one for the South, filling a long-standing gap in specialist care for terminally ill children. But adult hospice providers say that announcement, while welcome, does not touch the underlying gap in the rest of the system.
The political weight of this story comes from the gulf between the rhetoric of frontline health and the reality on the ground. Hospices are charities that hold contracts with Health New Zealand to deliver a service the public hospital system would otherwise have to provide at much higher cost. When a hospice bed closes, the patient does not stop being unwell. They are admitted to a Middlemore or a Wellington Hospital ward, where a day costs the taxpayer several multiples of the equivalent day in hospice care, or they are sent home to families with no nursing support. Sector advocates argue that underfunding hospices is therefore a false economy that simply shifts cost into the most expensive part of the system.
Labour, the Greens and Te Pati Maori have all signalled they intend to make hospice funding an issue in the lead-up to the 2026 election, alongside broader pressure on community-based health services such as Plunket and rural general practice. Hospice nurses are also caught up in the long-running pay equity dispute, which has left many fearing they will not see any payout even if their claims succeed. Totara Hospice’s funding model has previously prompted the New Zealand Nurses Organisation to publicly call on the government to step in and prevent service cuts in South Auckland.
For voters, hospice funding sits in the same emotional territory as ambulance services and after-hours GPs. It is the kind of spending that most New Zealanders, regardless of how they vote, expect a functioning state to underwrite. The question heading into the campaign is whether the coalition is prepared to put a number on the table that matches what Paine, McCafferty and their colleagues say is required, or whether the sector will be told to keep filling the gap with op shop revenue and bequests.
Readers who want to compare where each party stands on health and end-of-life care funding can use our 2026 Voting Tool, which maps the major party positions on this and other key issues ahead of polling day.
What do you think? Should hospice funding be ring-fenced and lifted to match what the sector says is needed, or is the answer a different model of palliative care altogether? Let us know in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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