“It’s physically and mentally exhausting,” she said.<\/p>\n
There weren’t enough beds – especially as the demand grew with an ageing population<\/a> – and the three-year political cycle was ill-suited to long-term planning and reform, she said.<\/p>\n “My challenge to our politicians and especially going into this next election is to work together.<\/p>\n “As leaders of the country, we need people who are prepared to put the country’s interests first and to make a long-term plan.”<\/p>\n She said there also needed to be more focus on prevention, to ease pressure on the health system.<\/p>\n “Part of the difficulty is we know that 80 to 90 percent of health is determined by those social determinants rather than the health system.<\/p>\n “And you cannot fix 10 to 15 years of rough sleeping presenting with a chest infection with a course of antibiotics.”<\/p>\n One doctor says working in Middlemore Hospital’s emergency department resembles “scenes from overseas during the Covid era and during armed conflict”.<\/p>\n LDR<\/p>\n She explained that social factors such as secure income, employment, housing, exposure to stress and healthy foods played a fundamental role in a person’s health.<\/p>\n Author and journalist Rebecca Macfie gave the keynote speech at the conference, which included her research on the intersection of poverty and health outcomes.<\/p>\n Her findings revealed that many children in high-equity index schools had difficulties with their hearing and sight.<\/p>\n She said that almost a third of the 18,000 children screened by NGO Painga Project needed to see an optometrist<\/a>.<\/p>\n “If your household is crowded because that is your wh\u0101naus rational economic response to unaffordable rents and low incomes, the before-school check is very much less likely to screen you or see you.<\/p>\n “So those are some of the reasons why a child can end up at the age of 10 or 11 with some of their most fundamental health needs unmet – unable to see or hear properly,” she said.<\/p>\n ASMS member Tanya Wilton, who works as an emergency physician at Hutt Hospital, said she felt “ashamed” of the care provided to the elderly.<\/p>\n “It’s really disheartening to be in the position where you can’t provide what you would consider basic.”<\/p>\n She said she’d recently cared for a patient with a broken pelvis in their late nineties, whom she knew personally and admired.<\/p>\n “But that person spent 48 hours in a corridor on a trolley.”<\/p>\n ASMS President Katie Ben, who works as a consultant anaesthetist at Nelson Marlborough, said it was “very disheartening” to work in healthcare right now.<\/p>\n Dr Katie Ben<\/p>\n Matt Shand ASMS<\/p>\n “We don’t have enough staff, we don’t have enough beds, we don’t have enough nurses, we don’t have enough equipment, we don’t have enough protected infrastructure.<\/p>\n “We don’t have enough basic attention to the simple things that would make life work – an integrated IT system so that one hospital can talk to another.”<\/p>\n She revealed that she was receiving messages the morning of the conference to help organise cover.<\/p>\n “We carry on ’til we can’t. We get fed up with being told we have to cancel our long-standing family commitments. We get fed up because we have to work yet another shift.”<\/p>\n She called for a long-term workforce strategy that would allow patients to access the same quality of care regardless of their income and location.<\/p>\n Health minister ‘isn’t fit to hold the health portfolio’<\/p>\n Ben was critical of Health Minister Simeon Brown for not attending the conference.<\/p>\n Last year, he accused senior doctors of “crossing an ethical line” with industrial action<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Middlemore](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/4M2DR0W_image_crop_132336.jpeg\")
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