An immigration service set up by Health New Zealand in October still has not recruited any overseas GPs almost eight months later.<\/p>\n
Te Whatu Ora’s International Recruitment Centre aims to make it “as easy as possible” for international health professionals to move to Aotearoa.<\/p>\n
But no internationally trained GPs are touching down on New Zealand soil, and some GPs trained here say the recruitment exercise is a waste of time anyway.<\/p>\n
General Practice Owners Association (GenPro) chairperson Angus Chambers said New Zealand’s healthcare was in an unhealthy state.<\/p>\n
“I’ve never seen access to primary care as bad as it is now,” he said.<\/p>\n
“A very large number of clinics have got their books closed; many people are waiting weeks and weeks to see their GPs.”<\/p>\n
Chambers’ own clinic in Christchurch had just closed its books again, while a recent GenPro survey showed just 45 percent of New Zealand’s clinics were taking on new patients.<\/p>\n
Chambers said general practices were understaffed and unsustainable.<\/p>\n
As part of a solution, Te Whatu Ora launched an immigration service last year, offering internationally trained health professionals free immigration advice, one-way airfares, temporary accommodation, and moving costs.<\/p>\n
The organisation highlighted GPs as a key group for recruitment, but so far, none had arrived.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson told\u00a0Checkpoint<\/em>\u00a0it was not that the campaign had been unsuccessful; Te Whatu Ora had been focussing on other parts of the health sector and had not yet tried to target GPs.<\/p>\n SOURCE RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An immigration service set up by Health New Zealand in October still has not recruited any overseas GPs almost eight months later. Te Whatu Ora’s International Recruitment Centre aims to make it “as easy as possible” for international health professionals to move to Aotearoa. But no internationally trained GPs are touching down on New Zealand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":5910,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5909","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\/5909","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=5909"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5911,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5909\/revisions\/5911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}