Emergency doctor shares insights
Clinical lead at Taupō Hospital Dr Jared Bayless with other doctors and supporters protesting on a wet blustery Thursday last week. Photo / Dan Hutchinson
The clinical lead at Taupō Hospital is heading home to the US but has provided an insight into the issues facing the medical sector in New Zealand.
Dr Jared Bayless was one of a handful of doctors plus supporters huddled outside Taupō Hospital on Thursday last week to protest the national issue of low wages and chronic understaffing at a local level.
“Yeah, we've been understaffed pretty massively for the last six or seven years. We've been at a full recruitment level and struggling to compete to recruit within New Zealand but also to compete with Australian wages.
“Coming from the US, it's about a 50% pay cut to come here.”
Dr Bayless has been back and forth to Taupō and the US for the past 13 years but has worked full time at the hospital for the past seven years. He is returning to Kentucky for family reasons.
Despite Taupō being an “amazing place to live and an amazing team to work with” they struggled to get the numbers to keep the service running.
“It's left us within 24-48 hours of not having any doctor on shift for the hospital.
“For us, when there's only one doctor for the entire hospital and after hours for the entire community between here and Tūrangi, that's a pretty perilous place to be in terms of staffing.
“You just feel like you're always on the edge of not being able to provide the service you want to provide.
“Instead of spending time developing services and providers and leaders, we're spending most of my time just making sure the roster is filled so that the doors stay open.
“I think people often don't realise how thin the service is in terms of if we suddenly don't have one doctor show up, that's it for the whole community after hours, which is a pretty massive impact throughout the region.”
Health Minister Simeon Brown was in Taupō last week as well to celebrate the hospital’s recent accreditation, allowing it to deliver Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM) training.
Brown says the accreditation is a significant step towards building a stronger rural health workforce in Taupō and will help increase the number of doctors trained with the broad skills needed to support rural communities.
Dr Bayless agreed, saying it will give the hospital and GP services a bigger pool of trainees to access and make the area more attractive for Australian rural specialists to want to come and work.
“If you offer the people the opportunity to train and teach clinically as well as working, then that's a big bonus. We're hopeful that will widen the pool where we're able to recruit from to upstaff ourselves.”
He says you need “critical mass” to keep it running and to be able to recruit people to a healthy department, allowing them to retain staff because the environment is supportive and productive.