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New Zealand is facing a serious shortage of GPs. Many family doctors will be hitting retirement age over the next decade and we're not training enough people to replace them - The Detail asks, what do we need to do about it?
General practitioners are at the frontline of our health system – but this branch of medicine is in bad shape.
In a nutshell: we don't have enough GPs, many of those we do have are planning to retire, and we're not training enough to replace them – and this is being felt especially acutely in rural areas.
"I think it's a serious problem now, and it has been for some years now," says Dr Fiona Bolden, who chairs the Rural General Practitioners Network.
"We already have communities that have no access to a GP at all.
"We've been really dependent on graduates from overseas to prop up rural areas for a long time now, and we've gone for years and years not training enough GPs, let alone rural GPs.
"It's already a crisis, there are already people who can't access a GP … and the chances of being able to get long-term care with the same GP in rural areas are massively reduced compared to what they used to be."
New Zealand’s ratio of 74 GPs for every 100,000 citizens is far below that of Australia and Canada.
Add to that, the average age of a GP in New Zealand is 53 and a survey conducted by the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners (RNZCGP) in 2020 showed some 50 percent of GPs are planning on retiring some time in the next decade.
RNZCGP medical director Dr Bryan Betty says given the long-term nature of training doctors, moves to arrest this decline need to start imminently.
"We need to produce more GPs within New Zealand," he says.
"We believe several things need to happen. Number one, possibly increasing the number of medical students going into medical school.
"Number two, there needs to be more exposure in undergraduate years to general practice. This has been underdone in medical schools at this point, it's a responsibility of the universities. They need to ensure medical students are exposed to general practice as well as hospital medicine in the undergraduate years.
"The third part: we need to have pay parity. We can't have a situation where there's an uneven playing field where these junior doctors, who've got large student loans … have this lack of pay parity, where if you choose one specialty route, you are paid less by the government than if you choose another specialty route in the hospital.
"It’s a long-term issue getting all that lined up. But it needs to be worked on very urgently."
