The immigrant doctors keeping New Zealand alive
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How does New Zealand's healthcare system rely on international doctors?
Without overseas doctors, New Zealand's struggling health system would be flatlining.
In the U.S., where I practiced, everyone was from the U.S. for the most part, versus here in Palmy Lake. I do not believe there's a single New Zealand-born emergency medicine doctor in our department.
How dire would our situation be if we didn't get these doctors in from, say, the U.K. and the U.S.?
We would be even more on our knees than we already are.
Hi, I'm Amanda Gillies, and today on The Detail, New Zealand's dependence on international doctors. We look at why so many are moving here, especially to our smaller towns, the benefits, the drawbacks, and if they actually do stick around. This story follows Timaru making a front-page splash in the States last month.
Timaru found itself on the front page of the Wall Street Journal last week in a story about US doctors moving to work here.
It's pretty exciting, isn't it? It's nice to be noticed on the world stage and quite a neat little story behind it. So, you know, I think it's pretty cool.
Today we talk to the Mayor of Timaru as well as the Policy Director at the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, which has just completed a report, recruited globally, neglected locally, which asked overseas trained members about their biggest challenges.
One of the things that really struck us about the survey was how doctors who had been here for some time saw an erosion in the health care system that they arrived into. So when they came here, they found that they felt privileged to be here and privileged to be working in such a system. And now they see a system that is underfunded and increasingly run down and it doesn't have the resources needed to treat the needs that they see every day. So that was a real shift and it wasn't one that we expected.
More from Harriet Wilde in a moment. But first, Dusty Bratton. He's an emergency medicine consultant at Palmerston North Hospital. He moved here from the States with his lawyer wife a few months ago, chasing the laid-back Kiwi lifestyle.
Me and my wife first visited here in 2018 on our honeymoon and just fell in love with the country and started kind of the dream of one day potentially living here. And then about a year ago at the jobs we were both at, we were ready for a change and started looking around and decided it's time to actually make this dream a reality. So now here we are.
Do you actually think it's easier to be a doctor in New Zealand, say, compared to back home?
It's a very difficult question because there are certain things that were easier back home and there are definitely certain things that are easier here. Back home, we definitely worked longer hours and I feel like there was a little more stress involved at work. But then there are other things like here that I find the computer systems a little more cumbersome and complicated. And then navigating certain systems here are more difficult. How fragmented the electronic medical record system is. In the U.S., it's very common that there will be like one system that you kind of work on at work as far as it has all the patient information, allows you to order labs or x-rays. Versus here, it's much more fragmented.
And I do feel like it introduces a place for error there. Just because you have to kind of log in so many different applications or apps and you end up spending a lot more time on the computer than I'm used to. So you spend more time looking at a computer screen than with a patient here that I did back home. And I do feel like that's probably because of how fragmented the electronic medical record system is. So it's kind of a mixed bag. Some things are easier. Some things are harder. And overall, honestly, fairly similar.
What about pay? This is a very personal question, but do you earn less in here or less over in America?
Yeah, so again, that was a difficult thing for us to come to terms with because the pay is much less here than it was back home. And that is also compounded by the fact that back home, my wife was a practicing attorney.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How does New Zealand's healthcare system rely on international doctors?
0:03–5:28
2
What challenges do overseas doctors face when moving to New Zealand?
5:28–10:55
3
How does the work-life balance differ for doctors in New Zealand compared to the U.S.?
10:55–20:44
4
What cultural differences do international doctors experience in New Zealand?
20:44–22:27