Call for foreign doctor drive
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, 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 its annual conference 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 of issues affecting the level and quality of care outlined in the report 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 foreigntrained doctors, ASMS said more were needed because of the difficulties in retaining locally-trained doctors, and to help alleviate heavy workloads current staff were dealing with.
‘‘We have a lot of medical specialists around the country that are overworked, frustrated, worried, emotional. 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 anymore.’’
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 430,000 children and adults had an unmet need for hospital care.
Health Minister David Clark attributed blame for chronic under-funding of the health sector to the previous National government, saying its long-term problems were inherited.
‘‘We’ve invested more in our workforces, and 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.
‘‘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,’’ Clark said.