Call for foreign doctor drive
Staff shortages hit hard in healthcare
An extensive recruitment campaign to entice specialist doctors from overseas could help ease the burden on the country’s senior doctors, the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) says.
Burnout and insufficient resourcing coupled with mounting patient demand has seen hospital care reach a ‘‘tipping point’’, with doctors struggling to keep up with demand for their services, the senior doctors and dentists’ union said.
The ‘‘precarious state of New Zealand’s public health services’’ has been laid bare in a new ASMS report, Hospitals on the Edge, released ahead of the union’s annual conference on the same theme starting in Wellington on Thursday.
The report was prompted by the ‘‘rising concern’’ of members about the ‘‘increasingly unsafe state of our public hospitals and clinical services’’, the union said.
Among the myriad issues affecting the level and quality of care was the need to increase doctor numbers across all medical specialities, ASMS national president Professor Murray Barclay said.
While New Zealand has one of the highest percentages of foreign-trained doctors, ASMS said more were needed because of the difficulties in retaining locally trained doctors, and to help alleviate the heavy workloads that current staff were dealing with.
‘‘We have a lot of medical specialists around the country that are overworked, frustrated, worried, emotional,’’ he said.
‘‘They’re being asked to do more than what they can cope with and there is not enough staff in New Zealand.
‘‘I guess the main issue is that it’s really a plea for more investment into healthcare into New Zealand to allow there to be enough medical specialists and dentists to cope with patient demand,’’ Barclay said.
Retaining our own trainees was a ‘‘real problem’’, with doctors and dentists able to find more attractive working conditions and higher pay overseas.
The number of new doctors graduating from medical school was also failing to keep pace with population growth.
‘‘When you don’t have enough doctors in a service and everyone is working above and beyond the call of duty, people get burned out and eventually can’t tolerate it any more,’’ Barclay said.
‘‘The situation becomes unbearable. [Working conditions are] probably a more prime thing which are causing problems for doctors rather than salary.
‘‘The salary adds to make it more attractive, but the working conditions are very important.’’
As the country’s population continued to grow, acute hospital admissions and emergency department demand was outstripping available staffing and resources, while the report also estimated that 430,000 children and adults had an unmet need for hospital care.
‘‘There are simply too few staff, too few acute hospital beds, too many patients discharged before they should be, too many facilities unfit for purpose, and too many patients denied access to timely treatment because hospitals lack capacity,’’ the report said.
Health Minister David Clark attributed blame for chronic underfunding of the health sector to the previous National Party-led government, saying the current Government had inherited longterm problems.
‘‘Since this Government took office there are now 1699 additional nurses, 677 more doctors, 105 more midwives, and 594 allied health staff working in our hospitals,’’ Clark said.
‘‘Given that it can take up to seven years to train a medical specialist, we acknowledge that it will take time to rebuild these workforces, just as it will take more than one or two Budgets to address nine years of neglect, but this Government has made a good start.’’