lacks a permanent full-time urologist<\/a>.<\/p>\nRoyal Australasian College of Surgeons chairperson Dr Sharon English told Morning Report the shortage extended to other regions including Tauranga and Nelson Hospitals where locums were used regularly.<\/p>\n
“This is a problem that exists not only in Southland but other rural areas of New Zealand. There’s a lot of places with a shortage of urologists.”<\/p>\n
English said a number of hospitals needed to use locums to make sure the service continued to run.<\/p>\n
The issue, English said, was retaining trainees in New Zealand.<\/p>\n
“Trainees in New Zealand aren’t given any indication there is a job they can come back to and as their training they tend to do a year overseas, to get more specialist training, work with different urologists, but if they get offered a job they may decide to stay and we’ve lost a number of trainees to Australia in recent years.”<\/p>\n
English said trainees going overseas needed to know they had a job coming up they could go back to.<\/p>\n
The immediate solution to the shortages could only be someone in New Zealand taking up the jobs, English said, which would leave a hole somewhere else.<\/p>\n
Morning Report invited Health New Zealand to come on the show and respond, but was yet to be taken up on the offer.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Health New Zealand acknowledged patients were waiting longer than it wanted in Southland but said patients were being triaged according to their need and wait time.<\/p>\n
It said it was committed to strengthening its urology workforce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A shortage of urologists is an issue beyond just Southland, the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons says. Documents…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":617853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-617852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}