Ideas to help relieve the shortage of doctors in New Zealand short-term involving both junior doctors and those with more than a sprinkling of grey hair were suggested in Wellington yesterday.
Long-term solutions to the shortage of doctors in New Zealand may be some years away, but the Government could introduce the "magic bullet" of loan write-offs now to help keep junior doctors in the country, Medical Students Association president Anna Dare said.
Her remarks followed a media briefing organised by the NZ Medical Council on workforce issues.
Loan repayment incentives that applied nationally rather than just in rural areas were favoured by the association, she told the Otago Daily Times.
It might be that local areas would want to introduce extra incentives, but the Government needed to support junior doctors per se.
The difficulty of incentive programmes which targeted just one area, such as the rural sector, was that it was not necessarily retaining more doctors in the country, but just redistributing those who stayed.
The association is not advocating bonding of doctors; rather, a graduated loan write-off which would be offered at graduation and apply after two years. Locums would not be eligible.
The Government had not acknowledged the true extent of the doctor shortage and the need to retain NZ-trained doctors, she said.
Between 36% and 42% of doctors in the country were foreign-trained and about a third of NZ-trained doctors had left by the end of their third postgraduate year.
Ms Dare wants to see the loan write-offs dealt with at government level through the Inland Revenue Department rather than addressed through employment agreements.
Interest-free student loans had been welcomed, but students were graduating with an average of $65,000 debt and this was affecting their decisions about where to practise medicine.
Hutt Valley District Health Board chief medical adviser Dr Robert Logan said more approaches could be made to those doctors who were getting to the end of their careers to see what service they might still be willing to give.
Such doctors could do outpatient work or work on hospital committees.
The government-appointed Medical Training Board, which was set up last year to provide oversight of the education and training of medical practitioners, is expected to report later this year.
It is charged with looking into how the system should produce practitioners which meet the needs of the health sector.
This would include the number of practitioners required..
