Minister of Health Simeon Brown cuts a ribbon at Auckland Hospital last month. Photo: Marika Khabazi
A senior doctor at Auckland Hospital is warning more doctors will burn out and leave if easy operations are outsourced to private hospitals to cut public waiting lists.
The Health Minister has been warned there are serious risks to outsourcing thousands of operations to private hospitals.
But Simeon Brown's office withheld most of the information from the public, while Health NZ released the full memo to RNZ.
Private hospitals will be given two- to three-year contracts guaranteeing high volume, low complexity cases - aiming to clear 20,000 of them.
Auckland radiologist Colleen Bergin said that will devastate the public health system, which is already struggling with staff shortages.
"This will send the workforce into private. The pay is better, the parking is better, the transport is better, everything is better."
She said doing a private hospital list would be easier than dealing with multiple complex cases in a public hospital.
"It's far less complicated a day than dealing with the hospital. Yes, maybe some doctors like to deal with complex patients, but you can't deal with complex patients all the day, you get total burnout and then they leave."
Bergin has worked at Auckland Hospital for 25 years and also spent two decades teaching medical students.
She said she is seeing more move to Australia or take up private practice, leaving public altogether.
"It is extremely frustrating. I don't know who is telling him that this is all better done in private, but I bet it's not somebody who works in the public system.
"For anyone to say that this can all be outsourced to private and you can still have any kind of decent quality of healthcare or of training of doctors in healthcare in the kind of system that he's talking about, it's just not going to happen. It's going to drain resources in the medical sphere."
The full memo from Health NZ warned about the loss of specialist surgeons, anaesthetists and medical imaging technicians from public health to private hospitals.
The memo said technicians had already been lost "as the private sector dramatically enhanced salaries to attract staff".
If the new outsourcing push also led to loss of staff, "waiting times for cases not suitable for outsourcing will likely increase".
Bergin said it was frustrating to think the warnings had gone unheeded and urged Brown to listen to people at the coalface in public healthcare.
"The public health system will be a disaster," she said.
"He needs to listen to the right people within the public hospital system to see how Mrs or Mr Smith in the community, when they get that terrible tummy pain, to see who they want to be outsourced to."
She said simple proceedures can quickly become complex.
"Somebody gets in there and it's far worse than they expect. What do they do? Send them over to the public system and 'oh sorry we don't have any surgeons here today. They've all gone to private or to Australia'."
Bergin said the fact the public health workforce would be asked to work evenings, weekends and public holidays to help clear the backlog of complex cases would be another reason to leave.
The College of Surgeons said most of its members already work long hours in both public and private sectors, and it doubts they will be able to do more.
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