Angus Chambers: GenPro Chair on the Health Minister setting aside funding to help uplift general practices

Concerns general practices will take too many patients to secure performance-based Government funding.  

The Health Minister's set aside 285 million-dollars to help uplift general practices as part of a larger boost to healthcare.  

The General Practice Owners Association welcomes the initiatives - but is cautious about the impacts.  

Chair Angus Chambers told Andrew Dickens practices will open their books to get more money without increasing their workforce.  

He says he's waiting until it's made clear how performance will be measured. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So the new Health Minister, Simeon Brown, has begun making
moves to try and save our deteriorating healthcare system. So
yesterday he announced two hundred and eighty five million dollars
in performance based funding for GPS, a new twenty four
to seven digital service, and in an additional one hundred
placements for overseas trained doctors. So to talk us through
all of this, we've got Jempro chaired doctor Angus Chambers

(00:23):
with me. Hello, Angus, good morning. Is just what you
were hoping to get.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Look, it's a good start. We applaud the efforts to
address the what is basically a crisis in general practice,
but I'm not quite sure if it's going to achieve
what they want want it to.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Yeah, what's this performance based funding for GPS? How will
that increase primary care?

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah? Well, look it's talented as you know. Funding that
will decrease the wait time to see GPS. Government commissioned
an independent body to kind of serve a GP and
report back to it. There's basically a gap of about
one hundred and thirty seven million dollars a year, and
this is on data five years old needed to enable

(01:09):
general practice deliver what it needs to. So this is
basically ninety five million dollars a year. Probably the figure
that was one hundred and thirty seven is closer to
two hundred now, so it's maybe about half of what's needed.
And then the performance based funding is quite concerning, and
general practices, by and large independent businesses performing extremely well.

(01:30):
Now if you let's say, the one of the big
issues is the closed books. So if you put there's
a part of your performance and practices open their books
to get more money, there's no extra workforce. There more
patients going in, the wait time is going to get longer.
So it's not quite clear until we see the detail
of the performance at money, how it's going to play out.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
It could possibly incentivize them just to slam their way
through clients quicker.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Well, I think private business does that anyway. That's why
general practice that's quite efficient because there's a business imperative.
I don't think gps are actually lazy and sort of
sitting around having cuts the tea and champagne. They're actually
head down working really hard. And by the way, when
you spend your day seeing patients, you've still got several
hours at the end of the day that you need

(02:20):
to do the paperwork. So yeah, not not clear.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Yeah exactly, But it's still performance based funding, so they're
going to be ranked whether they like it or not. Now, look,
we all know doctors who have come here who can't
work because we didn't provide enough training opportunities. One hundred
placements for overseas trained doctors will come into place. How
did we ever allow that imbalance to happen while we
had high immigration figures.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Look, I don't know. We're pleased to see it happen.
That will make some difference. It's going to take a
bit of time. It's got a lot of work that
goes into getting those doctors to the place that they
need to be to deliver care to New Zealand's population.
You'd have to ask the workforce planners about that. There's
been abject failure in work force planning in our system
for quite a long time. We've been warning for almost

(03:04):
two decades of the crunch of retiring gps and impoundered
by the fact that people are leaving the profession of
term some conditions. So I think it's a question better
addressed to the workforce planners. But the answer is I
don't know.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
Okay, well, but you know what people say. They go, well,
you've got an English doctor who decides to come to
New Zealand make a new life. They come here and
then they're told they can't they can't actually do any
services for us for at least two years. They're going
to go through a training placement if they can actually
find a room there, And everyone says, we'll hold on
and English bodies just the same as New Zealand bodies.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, I think that's where I think we might have
this wrong. The English doctors are able to come and
practice like that, although we would like, obviously bureaucracy or
so that these doctors are outside of jurisdictions that are
recognized by the Medical Council. So yeah, we're absolutely propped
by English popped up by English doctors. We've got a
fantastic contribution by English doctors.

Speaker 1 (03:59):
So I got going a minute, I got my metaphor wrong,
but you know what I mean. A body's a body,
a doctor's a doctor. But there we go, and now
we've got one hundred extraplacements for overseas training doctors to
go in and find out how to be a New
Zealand doctor.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
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