Medical school won’t fix doctor shortage
Asevere shortage of rural GPs in Taranaki would not be helped by the establishment of a third medical school, a leading academic says.
Stuart McCutcheon, vicechancellor of the University of Auckland, said the government needed to ignore the hype around a bid for a medical school in the Waikato and make decisions that would benefit all rural New Zealanders.
A joint proposal by the Waikato District Health Board and Waikato University was ‘‘about the least efficient way imaginable of providing more rural health professionals’’, McCutcheon said.
‘‘It would require several hundred millions of investment in a university that - unlike the world-class medical schools we already have at Auckland and Otago – has no medically related subjects ranked in the top 500 in the world. Yet the government has turned down previous requests for capital investment other than in relation to the Canterbury earthquakes.
‘‘This government prides itself on astute financial management. It now has the opportunity to demonstrate that in considering how best to meet the health needs of rural New Zealand.’’
Taranaki has the lowest GP to patient ratios in the country and rural areas face the biggest shortage.
In South Taranaki there are 26.9 full-time equivalent GPs, based on a 40-hour working week, per 100,000 people, 43.2 for the Stratford district and 67.6 for the New Plymouth district. The national average is 69.8.
With at least half of all GPs expected to retire in the next 10 years, Taranaki’s medical position look set to get worse.
McCutcheon said the issue for New Zealand was not the number of medical graduates but where they practised.
‘‘Setting up a new medical programme, especially a postgraduate programme, would be an extremely expensive way of addressing this issue,’’ he said.
The country’s two existing medical schools were already responding to the country’s increased demand for doctors and would be producing 570 medical graduates each year by 2020, 200 more than in 2008.
‘‘The scale of these increases was agreed with the government and the health sector, but will be jeopardised if the Waikato proposal goes ahead because the Waikato DHB has already said that it will reduce our clinical placements.’’
Both the Auckland and Otago medical schools had extensive programmes to encourage their graduates to practise in the rural and regional areas. These programmes operated nationwide, not just in one region, McCutcheon said.
The University of Auckland has 16 sixth-year students completing year-long placements at Taranaki Base Hospital and numbers will double next year when fifth-year students begin placements in Taranaki for the first time.
McCutcheon said Auckland and Otago, together with AUT and the College of General Practitioners, had provided the government with a proposal to establish 10 rural training hubs across the country over the next five years.