Kerre Woodham: Why did they wait til now to train more doctors?

Now the National Party announced some weeks ago that should it become Government, a new medical school will be established at Waikato University. They've also said they'd add another 50 placements in Otago and Auckland from 2025.

Now Labour, in the midst of an unprecedented senior specialist strike, has woken up to the fact that we're short of doctors. Who knew? And has announced an extra 95 doctors will be accepted for training at Otago and Auckland in 2025 should they become Government.

Cool, say the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, any boost to student numbers is great, but it would be 10 to 15 years before any of them qualified as consultants. They say they need 1700 specialist doctors and dentists right now.

So why over the past six years was this government faffing around with bike bridges to the North Shore, lowering speed limits around the city, renaming Government departments, trying to get RNZ and TVNZ merged —all the frilly stuff— without addressing a very real concern, a very real need, something that impacts on all of us to augment our health services? Why have they waited till their second election campaign, (really third), to say hey, you know what? We don't have enough doctors.

At any time during our lockdown when the borders were closed, when the Government was banging on about the need to train up our own professionals and tradies, about the fact that New Zealanders needed to do the jobs, we couldn't afford to rely on importing the people we needed to do essential jobs, at any time they could have ticked the box and said train more doctors.

And they didn't. And they haven't, until yesterday.

Chris Hipkins said an extra 335 more doctors per year by 2027 would cost $1 billion over 10 years. The Labour Government has thrown away $29.2 billion on light rail in Auckland. How many doctors would $29.2 billion give us? Doctors, dentists and nurses? It incenses me.

Along comes a pre-election whiz bang press release announcing an extra 95 doctors will be accepted for training from 2025. Speaking at Otago University yesterday, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said New Zealand really needs to ramp up its efforts if we're going to train the workforce we need here in New Zealand.

Well, yes, yes, it does! And with a stroke of a pen you could have done that. And we needed to do that five years ago, not right now. We needed to do that when you closed the borders, not right now when you're desperate to win an election. We could have had the first tranche of new doctors coming out now if you'd decided the healthcare sector was worth investing in.

So a new med school and increased placements under National or keep just the two training universities and up the placements. What would be best for the country as far as you're concerned? The acting Dean of Otago, Tim Wilkinson, says there is no shortage of people who would make excellent doctors, they just haven't had enough places for all of them. So now there are will you reapply? What do you do if you don't make it into Med school? It's a very niche area of study. You're obviously a high performance machine. What do you do next? Many wannabe doctors go to Australia and they are very, very hard to get back. It would be great to keep more of our own people here.

How the hell has Labour just woken up to the fact that we need to train more doctors. Would they not have looked at that when the borders were closed? No, just when their polls are plummeting. Unbelievable. The money that has been spent on nonsense when it could have been spent on New Zealanders working within the New Zealand health system. Staggering. Every day, every day, I'm freshly staggered.

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