The Government has committed $1.88 billion to build a new Dunedin hospital, while doing little to address the underlying issues of healthcare in Aotearoa New Zealand.
On Friday, Minister of Health Simeon Brown signed the contract with Australian construction company CPB.
General Practitioners Aotearoa (GPA) chair Dr Buzz Burrell says that’s a waste of taxpayer money.
“It’s like buying a really expensive, bulky, gold-trimmed cart when you’ve only got one geriatric donkey to pull it,” he says.
“Hospitals are crowd-pleasers because we want reassurance that they’ll be there when we get really ill.
“The problem is the Government has severely under-funded the donkey, that’s us GPs. So there will be more really ill people every year and this hospital’s beds will be full well before its completion in the 2030s.”
Increasing access to general practitioners is proven to improve health across the population and decrease the load on hospitals.1 2 3
According to the RNZCGP 2024 Workforce Survey4, 50% of GPs are planning to retire in the next 10 years.
There is no viable plan to replace them.
“Honestly, stocking up our GP workforce would cost a fraction of the nearly $2 billion that’s going into that hospital,” Burrell says, “and it would do a lot more to keep New Zealanders healthy.”
GPA estimates that paying an additional 500 full-time-equivalent GPs, 500 practice nurses, rooms, equipment and continuing education would cost less than $400 million per year.
“If we work on the well-established formula that ‘a dollar spent in general practice saves $10 down the track’, the savings made from this investment would pay for several Dunedin hospitals,” Burrell says.
“So who is advising the government on budgeting health expenses here?”
GPA recommends that the government take action to slow the GP retirement, attract new doctors into the GP workforce, and attract more GPs from overseas.
“If they want their shiny hospital, so be it,” Burrell says. “But they’d better fix up the GP situation first.”
GPA also supports hospital doctors going on strike with the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS).
“We need to break the cycle,” Burrell says. “Hospital doctors are being asked to pick up what we can’t do, but ironically cannot because they are already overwhelmed thanks to the GP shortage.”
References:
1 Ministry of Social Development: Prevalence and Consequences of Barriers to seeing a GP for children
2 Dr Prabani Wood, The New Zealand Initiative: The Heart of Healthcare: Renewing New Zealand’s Primary Care System
3 Royal Australian College of General Practitioners: Preventable hospitalisations soar in GPs’ absence: AIHW
4 Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners: 2024 Workforce Survey
