![\"Health](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/4K3PNWO_PD250725KOTUKU_Te_Kotuku_maternity_and_children_s_unit_at_Whang_rei_Hospital_jpg.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nUrologist says staffing levels at Nelson Hospital are ‘dire’<\/p>\n
A doctor struggling to cope with staffing levels at Nelson Hospital says he and his colleagues fear no one is listening to them.<\/p>\n
Dr Patrick Meffan has been a urologist in Nelson for more than three decades. He is now the sole doctor in the region doing complicated surgery for a number of cancers.<\/p>\n
He said the current problems with healthcare were decades in the making.<\/p>\n
“It really was magnified when two colleagues left a year ago and neither of those have been replaced. I have tried by every method I can to try and get this problem resolved and I don’t think I’m being heard,” he told Checkpoint.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been worried that our system may entirely collapse and leave everyone stranded.”<\/p>\n
The current staffing levels meant some people would miss out on being seen, he said.<\/p>\n
Operations involving the prostate, bladder and kidneys were difficult, he said, and he was having to do far more to keep up.<\/p>\n
“In most of my career, I have done one of those a fortnight, roughly.<\/p>\n
“In the last little while I’ve been doing two a week – so that’s approximately four times as much.<\/p>\n
“I’m not getting any younger, and the physical demands of that are pretty hard. I think even outside of that that’s a lot of work to do,” he said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Te Whatu Ora said it shared doctors’ concerns over staffing at the Nelson-Marlborough urology service.<\/p>\n
RNZ \/ Peter de Graaf<\/p>\n
“They are an operation that takes, generally, three or four hours. But sometimes up to six hours,” he told Checkpoint.<\/p>\n
Staffing levels meant smaller cases were taking a back seat too.<\/p>\n
“The smaller cases are the ones that are waiting a long period of time, maybe even up to a year sometimes.”<\/p>\n
Invercargill was a good example of what happens with healthcare when you “get to the point of implosion”, he said, and Nelson was not far behind.<\/p>\n
“I find it enormously frustrating and I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights trying to work this all out.<\/p>\n
“Everyone struggles with this fact that we have a system that the clinicians all think is failing, and then all of the bureaucratic side is saying ‘oh, no, we’ve got this’.<\/p>\n
“That’s fundamentally where I can’t see a way forward from this, unless there is an understanding that the health management system is, in my view, broken.<\/p>\n
“Everyone talks about a broken health service. I think we’ve got a broken management service.”<\/p>\n
Te Whatu Ora said it shared doctors’ concerns over staffing at the Nelson-Marlborough urology service, which had been impacted by a global shortage of specialists.<\/p>\n
It anticipated having two more urologists on board halfway through 2027.<\/p>\n
Nelson Hospital’s interim chief medical officer Dr Derek Sherwood said wait lists for initial specialist urology appointments had almost halved since last year.<\/p>\n
He said he was taking the situation seriously, and those requiring urgent care could still expect to be assessed and treated in a timely manner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Urologist says staffing levels at Nelson Hospital are ‘dire’ A doctor struggling to cope with staffing levels at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":946312,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[64,63,137,500],"class_list":["post-946311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=946311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/946312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=946311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=946311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=946311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}