A briefing to representatives of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) said the organisation understood that part of the delay in hiring came as a result of HNZ rolling out a new decentralised hiring software platform.
But this has caused several issues.
The briefing said vacancy rates for senior medical officers in the Southern Health District, when factoring in unmet need for healthcare, were as high as 21%.
This figure was determined by clinical leaders assessing current staffing, vacancies, plus additional senior medical officer FTE required to address unmet need of the community.
"Many departments are facing staffing shortfalls, and many senior medical officers are working additional hours.
"Barriers to addressing these shortfalls are being put in place by regional and national management."
ASMS chief executive Sarah Dalton said it meant "clinicians were doing it really hard" on the ground level.
"They’re feeling pretty stressed.
"They’re feeling like it’s very hard even just to maintain acute services, let alone a decent turnover of planned care and follow-up appointments for patients who need to be seen."
HNZ was yet to speed up the process for hiring at a more local level, she said.
"What we have been hearing is that districts in particular have been completely out of the loop in terms of ability to manage recruitment and to be efficient about that.
"At the end of the day, we need to make sure that there aren’t kind of bureaucratic inefficiencies that are getting in the way of signing up
new staff where they’re needed."
A key example of this need not being met was in mental health across the Southern district, and cardiology in Invercargill, she said.
ASMS had been told that HNZ’s authority to hire at the district level had been slowed down as requests were having to go through a regional committee which was yet to be officially established.
HNZ’s group director of operations for the Southern district Craig Ashton was more optimistic in his response to questions from the Otago Daily Times.
"The move to devolve decision-making back to regions and districts will provide us with a greater ability to manage activities such as recruitment at a more local level.
"Any vacancy in a small specialist team has a significant impact, and we are incredibly grateful for the additional support from our staff, private partners and locum providers that support our hospital specialist services.
"We also would like to acknowledge our primary and community partners and our wider district hospitals across the South Island as we work together for better outcomes across the region."
An HNZ spokesman said its recruitment budget provides for 373 senior medical officer FTE positions, of which 328 were filled.
That equated to a vacancy rate closer to 12%, he said.
Ms Dalton said HNZ was "dragging its heels" and ignoring the variances across different departments.
"They need to be coming to the table with hard-to-recruit allowances, rural allowances, small hospital allowances, the sorts of things that will help places like Invercargill or Timaru compete with larger centres in terms of trying to get the senior medical officers they need.
"We are still getting regular stories of doctors who would be willing to work in a particular place, but because the paperwork is so slow to reach them, they end up picking up offers in other places, whether in New Zealand or elsewhere."
