Doctor? No. And patients are now travelling far and wide for care
People from a south Taranaki town which has been left without a single doctor are putting pressure on medical centres up to 60 kilometres away.
Patea’s last doctor has left town and since Monday patients have been travelling as far as Hawera and Whanganui.
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, who runs the Ngati Ruanui Healthcare centre in Hawera, nearly 30 kilometres north of the tiny town, said on Friday ‘‘people from Patea were queuing out the door.
‘‘There was someone with an acute illness, a man with a sore back and a family with a baby.’’
She said Hawera hospital’s A&E department also seemed par- ticularly busy. ‘‘I did just come from A&E because my mum couldn’t get seen in Patea,’’ she said.
‘‘A & E was bulging at the seams. The staff were running off their feet and there was no room in the waiting room, so people were sitting down the corridor.’’
The Patea & District Community Medical Trust, which runs the Patea health centre, has been in search of a doctor for more than a year. But the board of volunteers has come up short and, in a statement released Thursday evening, announced the centre’s nurses would be filling in under standing orders for the 2300 patients until a doctor could be found.
Ngarewa-Packer has offered the Patea centre a doctor for a few hours a week but said her centre was ‘‘under extreme pressure’’ to care for its 6400 enrolled patients.
‘‘It’s a problem that was well overdue and it’s now become an acute problem,’’ Ngarewa-Packer said.
Patea patients have also been travelling roughly 60km east to the Whanganui Accident & Medical (WAM) clinic, communications and technology coordinator Karen Veldhoen confirmed.
She said the Whanganui Accident & Medical has had an increase in Patea residents attending the clinic since the start of June, compared to the same period last year.
Brett Honeyfield, who sits on the Patea & District Community Medical Trust, said its last permanent doctor had finished 18 months ago and since then the sur- gery had employed temporary doctors, or locums.
‘‘The last short-term guy finished last week,’’ he said. ‘‘And we can’t get anyone.’’
Honeyfield said locums were hired through a recruitment agency, which tacks another nearly 20 per cent on to the roughly $1000 a day it costs to hire a temporary doctor.
This cost is significantly more than a permanent general practictioner’s (GP) annual salary of $200,000 to $240,000.
‘‘It consumes a lot of time sourcing these people,’’ Honeyfield said. ‘‘They all want houses and travel.
‘‘I don’t know what the solution is. You can chuck more money at it but it’s more about the lifestyle and where the family want to live,’’ Honeyfield said.‘‘We’re about bloomin’ stuck really.’’
And it’s only going to get worse, Honeyfield said. ‘‘It’s a bomb about to explode.’’
He said in the next five years, half the country’s GPs would retire while ‘‘the young ones go overseas’’ to pay off their student debt.
‘‘You can’t just magic them out of the woodwork.’’
Dr Jo Scott-Jones, of Pinnacle Midlands Health Network, which works with the Taranaki District Health Board, said the shortage went back to the 1980s.
‘‘There was a lack of funding in GP training which left a gap,’’ he said.
‘‘The majority of them are in their 50s now.’’
Attracting the next slew of doctors will have to focus on meeting their lifestyle demands.
‘‘It does mean we need to do things differently than we have,’’ Scott-Jones said.
‘‘In the short-term we have to do what we can.’’
South Taranaki District Mayor Ross Dunlop said the GP shortage is ‘‘a major issue for our community’’.
He said wait times in Hawera were already hitting two to three weeks and neighbouring Waverley only had a part-time doctor who visited from Whanganui a few days a week.
‘‘I’m quite keen to work with the DHB to improve the situation,’’ Dunlop said.
The Taranaki District Health Board did not respond to a request for comment before deadline.
Andrew Inder, manager integrated service design with Ministry of Health, recognised a distribution problem with GPs in rural areas but said the Government had passed legislation enabling other qualified health practitioners to do things previously restricted to doctors.
‘‘This will help to make better use of the existing health workforce by increasing the range of functions,’’ he said.