Praneeta Mahajan
Hamilton, October 18, 2023
New Zealanders have voted for a change in government in the general election held on October 14, 2023 and Hamilton West has returned Tama Potaka for the first full term. He was voted into Parliament on December 10, 2022 following a by-election caused by the resignation of the previous Labour candidate Dr Gaurav Sharma.
The National Party was successful in Hamilton East as well with the election of Ryan Hamilton, a debut candidate.
Hamilton could be a step closer to having a Medical School at Waikato University, as promised by Party Leader Christopher Luxon during his election campaign.
If realised, this would become the third Medical School after the University of Auckland and Otago University in Dunedin.
Describing the shortage of medical staff as a ‘workforce crisis,’ Mr Luxon said, “The new Medical School will have clinical training alliances with other universities and medical facilities around New Zealand, a model that will deliver more doctors committed to serving in provincial and rural parts of the country. Increasing home-grown doctors is vital to delivering the public services that New Zealanders deserve and National sees this as an essential and long-term investment.”
The Proposal
The University of Waikato proposed the establishment of the New Zealand Graduate Entry Medical School (NZGEMS) based on the success of international models of community-engaged graduate entry-only medical schools.
The schools will select students who have completed a three-year undergraduate degree and provide them with four years of intensive, practical medical education, as opposed to six years at the existing medical schools in New Zealand. Students without undergraduate training in Science must complete an intensive one-semester preparation course.
The NZGEMS would accept 120 students in its first year, building to 160 students over time.
According to a Waikato University report, New Zealand is short of doctors in primary care and outside the main centres because of the student selection and training models currently in place.
“The International literature in medical education is very clear. Our health workforce outcomes are a function of how we select students and where we train them. A student from a small town is much less likely to aspire to provide primary care in their home town after spending eight years, the majority in a tertiary hospital setting, in Dunedin or Auckland,” it said.
New Zealand suffers from a critical shortage of doctors, resulting in long wait times for appointments with GPs in some areas, treatment at the emergency departments and non-urgent surgery through the public health system.
“We need to import so many doctors from other countries because New Zealand has one of the lowest ratios of medical schools, and of medical training places, relative to population, of any country in the OECD. We have one medical school for every 2.35 million people, while Australia has one primary medical school per 1.2 million people, and we have 109 first-year medical school places per million people against Australia’s 160 places per million people,” a Waikato University spokesperson said
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Commitment to primary care
The New Zealand Graduate Entry Medical School will have a commitment to primary care at the core of its operations. Primary care practitioners work across a range of areas including preventative medicine, chronic disease management, mental health, child health and acute care medicine.
“Our school will achieve different health workforce outcomes by selecting students who are committed to careers in primary care and to serving high-needs communities outside the main centres, and ensuring a high proportion of their training occurs in these settings,” the report said.
The NZGEMS proposal follows a widely accepted and successful model currently in use in Australia and Canada. Internationally, the distributed education model has been shown to both lower the system-wide costs of ill health by improving access to health care, and foster economic development to provide benefits that far outweigh the cost of investment.
The choice of Waikato
The Midland region has 13% fewer doctors than the rest of the country. Being based in Hamilton, close to many high-needs communities, there will be a higher potential for clinical education and training opportunities throughout New Zealand for the students of the institute.
Waikato University has successfully developed its nursing programme, now one of the largest in New Zealand. In developing the programme, the University demonstrated its ability to build a dynamic partnership with Waikato Hospital and create clinical placement opportunities for students in primary care settings across the region.
The NZGEMS would aim to build on the success of the University’s nursing programme.
Praneeta Mahajan is an Indian Newslink reporter based in Hamilton.
