Supporting people from provinces into medicine

It seems that the ideal way to get medical staff to stay long-term in the regions is to actively encourage and support the people who live there to go into medical training, says Zena Simpson. 

When I was reading the article with Dr Fergus Aitcheson (“GP sector in grave situation due to long-term underfunding”, July 29), I was reminded of research (Murray, 2023) done in Australia about doctors and rural communities. 

Rural communities in Australia, similarly to New Zealand, have an ongoing shortage of doctors. The Government and private institutions have been trying a lot of methods to fix this, including offering incentives and high salaries in some cases. However, according to research, even if these opportunities are attractive for some doctors at the beginning, only an insignificant number of them stay in rural areas after a few years. 

The evidence shows that the only group that stays in non-metropolitan areas (and who love working in rural towns) are people who have a rural background. I think this might apply to New Zealand as well. 

But instead of trying to get more students from non-metropolitan areas to study medicine, from what I see, New Zealand has a desire to try to solve the problem through immigration. As an immigrant myself, I always believed that since I am living in someone else’s home/land, I should not come empty-handed. And most immigrants do that by contributing any way they can to the communities they live in. 

However, when it comes to healthcare, data shows that most immigrant doctors have a tendency to move to metropolitan areas as well. Australia has about 3000 overseas-trained doctors entering the sector annually, but very few stay in the regional areas. Gisborne seems to be lucky in the sense that it had a loyal group of doctors with the vision to create a well-functioning, up-to-date (and underappreciated) medical centre that serves the community. 

But it seems that the ideal way to get medical staff to stay long-term in the regions is to actively encourage and support the people who live there to go into medical training. 

In case there are people who don’t know, here is the link to help get the rural or semi-rural people into medicine in New Zealand: https://uoa.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a — id/1808/~/regional-rural-admission-scheme-eligibility. 

Zena Simpson