Healthcare compromised — doctor
General Practice Owners’ Association (GenPro) chairman Dr Tim Malloy sees no great mystery in why some hospital emergency departments (EDs), including in Northland, are at capacity and under increasing pressure.
“Every day we are seeing patients presenting at their general practice for essential healthcare because they are waiting unreasonably long periods for a specialist appointment at their local hospital, or even worse, they are one of the many patients who are now being declined a specialist hospital appointment despite one being deemed necessary by their GP,” he said.
“One of the impacts this has is that other patients are no longer able to get to see their GP for routine appointments without waiting days, or even weeks.”
GenPro believed that the pressure on EDs was just one of the consequences of poor whole-of-system planning and a lack of appropriate resourcing to manage growing demand from an increasing and ageing population. Over a number of years, general practices across the country had been expected to manage the care of more and more patients whose needs would have historically been met by specialist hospital services, without additional resources or support.
It warned that if GPs continued to face such pressures, and could not access essential diagnostic or specialist services for their patients, care and health in communities would continue to be severely compromised.
Malloy said the pressure on EDs would be symptomatic of how the health system was failing New Zealanders.
The pressure on EDs was also affecting the ability of urgent care clinics to respond to patients presenting with urgent or life-threatening illnesses and injuries.
“With ambulances backed up outside EDs waiting to transfer their patients, we are often having to wait hours for an ambulance for those patients presenting in primary care but needing urgent ED or hospital care. Patients are certainly being put at risk, and GPs have no choice but to care for and support those patients despite not being resourced to do so,” he said.