Whakatāne Doctors Stretched, Tired and Horribly Understaffed
- Kieran Watkins
- Sep 26
- 3 min read
Whakatāne Hospital radiologist Dr Matthew Preston says cumbersome systems and uncompetitive pay is fueling a lack of doctors and medical staff, leading to doctors who are tired and stretched.
"Some people are leaving full-time jobs to go and work as locums where they fill in for others where the hourly pay is significantly better."
He says part of the successive government's solution has been to send patients to the private sector so they can get their procedures done. But that trend is creating a vacuum for more staff in the private sector.
"So people leave public to go into private. It becomes a bit of a self-defeating thing in the sense that we now have a large number of doctors going into the private sector because there's more work there and they earn more for their services."
"And I think people notice that by longer waiting times in the emergency department, but also just longer times just to get around to have any kind of care."
Dr Preston says medical staff are also leaving the public health system to work in Australia where they can earn up to twice as much.
He says overseas health models aren't much help.
"America's system, which is essentially private, doesn't seem to have solved the problem. When we look to the UK with the NHS (National Health Service), and our system is somewhat modelled on the NHS, they have kind of been through this phase themselves. It seems like those places haven't figured out a solution."
"I think part of it is to make working in the public sector maybe not the best paid but well enough paid so people aren't immediately drawn by bigger salaries elsewhere."
He says that kind of change requires innovation.
"I'm not sure that New Zealand could afford to match the salaries that would be possible in Australia. But a working environment which is pleasant and where you feel as though you're making a real difference is something that's worth trying to get sorted."
From there, Dr Preston begins to touch on what makes working in the sector so difficult for staff.
"The systems that we work under can be quite onerous and complicated and perhaps they were originally designed as a protection to make sure that everybody gets a good deal, but it just seems as though our systems that have developed over the years just make it far more cumbersome to provide a reasonable service."
"Sometimes there's two or three times as much paperwork to get one person scheduled than there might be say in the private sector where it's much simpler, the system is simple."
"That's one example."
"I think it's a matter of streamlining things and making people proud to actually work for the public health service. So that's an attitude thing I think which needs to come from the very top, right from the top of the Minister of Health all the way through.
And that's in contradistinction to the current focus which seems to be entirely on numbers with no consideration for some of the realities of the human."
Meanwhile, fewer and fewer slots are available at Whakatāne Hospital for doctors to see patients, and the systems make it hard to recruit new staff to replace those who have left.
"The systems are designed to save money but make it very difficult to employ staff and sometimes we lose staff who have applied and said they'll come, but it takes so long to get through the system that they say 'oh it's not worth it, I'll go and work either in the private sector or in Australia where there's just less red tape'.
"So you end up quite often with gaps in staffing and where that becomes complicated is it means that you can't provide a consistent list of theatre sessions or a consistent time when you know you'll have someone in a clinic.
Dr Preston has worked at Whakatāne Hospital for 32 years and says he is probably the longest serving staff member.
"I feel bad because our place is being threatened so in that respect I guess I almost feel a little bit like maybe a grandfather, making sure that it all works okay."
