Times Last week Christopher Luxon and I hosted a well-attended public meeting on health in east Auckland which served as an opportunity for the community to express how important their local healthcare system is to them. This was spurred by last year’s closure of the overnight service at East Care following the loss of funding from the Counties Manukau District Health Board (DHB) in 2018. We launched a petition calling for the reinstatement of this service which attracted more than 10,000 signatures within a week and resulted in last week’s public meeting. Both the CEO and Chair of the Counties Manukau DHB fronted up to explain why the decision was made to discontinue funding overnight primary healthcare.