{"id":14771,"date":"2025-08-22T12:02:43","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T00:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=14771"},"modified":"2025-08-22T12:02:43","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T00:02:43","slug":"the-town-with-only-one-dentist-for-10000-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=14771","title":{"rendered":"The town with only one dentist for 10,000 people"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Buller mayor says people in Westport are having to wait up to six weeks for dental appointments because there is only one dentist.<\/p>\n

The town has been searching for a new dentist for almost a year.<\/p>\n

Jamie Cleine told\u00a0Morning Report<\/i>\u00a0there had been little to no interest over the past 12 months.<\/p>\n

“At one of our [Buller Health Trust] board meetings I said ‘look we need to do so something to elevate this position a bit and get a bit of attention'”, he said.<\/p>\n

Economic development agency Development West Coast launched a\u00a0“tongue and cheek” video<\/a>\u00a0this week in an effort to attract interest to the longstanding vacancy.<\/p>\n

The agency had previously been utilised for similar bids to attract doctors and nurses to the West Coast.<\/p>\n

\"Buller<\/p>\n

Buller mayor Jamie Cleine.\u00a0<\/span>Photo:\u00a0RNZ \/ Nate McKinnon<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

“I think the idea of the video is just to try and show that you know the lifestyle here is pretty good,” Cleine said.<\/p>\n

“You can have that great balance between professional and lifestyle that’s offered in Westport.”<\/p>\n

With only one dental surgeon covering an area of more than 10,000 people, appointment backlogs were significant.<\/p>\n

“We’ve got one and normally we would have two dentists. Westport itself has 4500 to 5000 people and and one dentist frankly can’t keep up,” Cleine said.<\/p>\n

“He certainly does his best to deal with the emergency stuff. But routine, primary dental appointments, checkups and things, there’s a month to six weeks.<\/p>\n

“That obviously leads to worse outcomes for people.”<\/p>\n

People who could afford to were travelling outside the district for dental appointments or putting it off completely, Cleine said.<\/p>\n

“Undoubtedly there will be a lot of people who just defer [appointments] and suffer in silence in the background.”<\/p>\n

This week a sector group\u00a0launched a strategy<\/a>\u00a0to tackle what they had dubbed “an oral health crisis”.<\/p>\n

The Dental Association said New Zealand’s oral health was in trouble, with one in three adults suffering from untreated tooth decay, and thousands of people ending up in hospital due to preventable dental problems every year.<\/p>\n

It said its Oral Health Roadmap 2025-2030 was a response to decades of minimal progress in oral health outcomes for many communities, despite good intentions and well-meaning public health initiatives.<\/p>\n

Source: RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Buller mayor says people in Westport are having to wait up to six weeks for dental appointments because there is only one dentist. The town has been searching for a new dentist for almost a year. Jamie Cleine told\u00a0Morning Report\u00a0there had been little to no interest over the past 12 months. “At one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":14773,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14771","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=14771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14774,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14771\/revisions\/14774"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}