Northland’s GP shortage leaves 25,000 without a family doctor. Photo \/ 123rf<\/p>\n
He called on Labour to produce its modelling, which supposedly showed how it would free up 4.5 million appointments. He warned that the health system would be overrun.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Brown claimed the system was \u201cheading in the right direction\u201d.<\/p>\n
He highlighted the new Waikato Medical School, which is set to train another 120 doctors per year, with the first cohort entering in 2028.<\/p>\n
One of Cunningham\u2019s concerns was the push for a non-doctor workforce.<\/p>\n
He said that, while this was being sold as a way to assist GPs, it raised safety issues.<\/p>\n
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists head Sarah Dalton told Morning Report that no one was speaking in a \u201cmeaningful way\u201d about the medical workforce in terms of specialist doctors, including GPs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we want a health system that is responsive and safe, it needs to continue to be led and staffed by senior doctors and dentists.<\/p>\n
\u201c… I think the focus on non-doctor healthcare is more about cost-cutting and a refusal to engage in the challenges of recruiting to hard-to-staff areas rather than what\u2019s best for patients.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dalton said that, while it was great that more doctors were to be trained at Waikato Medical School, the results would not be felt for another 10 to 15 years.<\/p>\n
She gave some points to Labour for focusing on acute flow in its policy.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe would argue that the targets that focus specifically on planned care and first specialist appointments are incentivising and, in fact, forcing hospitals to focus on those things at the expense of acute care and on follow-up appointments.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo patients with chronic medical conditions, particularly those who rely on the care of physicians, combinations of medications, monitoring over time, mental health patients who need regular contact with psychiatrists and their teams, are missing out through this focus on first specialist appointments.\u201d<\/p>\n
On discussions around AI freeing up time for GPs, Cunningham said the technology was not \u201cthe great panacea for general practice\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just a dictation service, really, for note-taking … it might just get you out the door at the end of the day, probably about 10 minutes sooner.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said a more successful model would be to triage patients at a clinic in the morning. This would include phoning patients to see if problems could be solved without an in-person appointment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat has a pretty high success rate, more so than telehealth, because obviously we know the patients, we have the notes there, but often patients are phoning merely for some pretty easy things.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cGeneral practice has to have attractive conditions and remunerations to have people want to specialise … It\u2019s a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644386,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[38864,3028,18791,2082,69835,305,134,527,685,1304,111,139,7805,69,1523,2954,1560,312,223347,223],"class_list":["post-644385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-answers","tag-chip","tag-fighting","tag-for","tag-gp","tag-have","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-last","tag-morning","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-no","tag-nz","tag-over","tag-parties","tag-report","tag-says","tag-seagulls","tag-the"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644385","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=644385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}