More general practices are closing their books, with over a third of the country’s GPs turning away new patients last year.<\/p>\n
A Victoria University of Wellington study has found 36 percent of general practices were not taking new enrolments in 2024, with districts in the lower North Island, Northland, and parts of the South Island most affected.<\/p>\n
The figure is a three percentage point increase from 2022, when Covid-19 was inflating demand for appointments and border closures kept overseas healthcare workers out.<\/p>\n
One of the study’s authors, Dr Jackie Cumming, said workforce shortages were a major reason GPs were turning people away.<\/p>\n
“Many GPs, for example, are coming up to retirement age. It’s been difficult to recruit in rural areas, it can be hard to recruit into general practices because there’s pay inequities between hospital care and community-based care.”<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the funding model for general practices had not changed significantly in two decades, Cumming said.<\/p>\n
Enrolment problems were magnified in certain areas – the Canterbury, Southern and Northland regions had the highest number of closed books, but the Hutt Valley, Lakes and Wairarapa districts were most affected when looking proportionally at how many practices operated in each region.<\/p>\n
Gore Health Clinic has been running a waitlist since October, when one of its doctors resigned.<\/p>\n
Practice manager Christine Miller said when a spot did become available, the clinic only took on people who were not enrolled anywhere else in the region.<\/p>\n
“We are not enrolling people in the Southland district who currently have a general practitioner,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Even if they’re living [in Gore] or they’ve moved to Gore and they still have a doctor in Invercargill we just politely ask them if they could just stay with their GP … basically it’s until we can get another doctor.”<\/p>\n
The clinic’s doctors each cared for as many as 1500 patients, Miller said, and taking on more could lead to burnout.<\/p>\n
However, convincing doctors to move to the regions could be challenging.<\/p>\n
“I mean Gore’s always had a bad rap you know, it’s like ‘oh, who wants to live in Gore’ type thing,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I come from the Bay of Plenty which is, you know, a beautiful area but I’ve never been happier being here. There’s great people, so much to do outside of work – and you’ve just got to get people to come here and experience that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More general practices are closing their books, with over a third of the country’s GPs turning away new patients last year. A Victoria University of Wellington study has found 36 percent of general practices were not taking new enrolments in 2024, with districts in the lower North Island, Northland, and parts of the South Island […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":12533,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12532"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12534,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12532\/revisions\/12534"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}