Source: Radio New Zealand
Kenepuru Community Hospital in Porirua. Google Maps
The senior doctors union says Health NZ needs to better staff Porirua’s Kenepuru Accident & Medical Clinic (KAMC), after it was left without a doctor overnight on Sunday.
Health NZ said the accident and medical clinic was without a doctor between 10.30pm on Sunday and 7am on Monday because the rostered staffer was sick, and they could not find anyone to cover the shift.
Instead, nurses assessed patients and decided whether they could wait until the morning, or needed emergency care.
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) executive director Sarah Dalton said it was unfair on the communities serviced by the clinic.
“Of course people get sick, but the question is why the employer is running the service in such a way that it’s impossible to cover… particularly at short notice,” she said.
“We think that the people in those communities have the same entitlement to after-hours care as people who live just 20 minutes further south or across in the Hutt Valley, both of which have fully commissioned emergency departments available to them.”
Sarah Dalton. LANCE LAWSON PHOTOGRAPHY / Supplied
Kenepuru Hospital, and KAMC service about 120,000 people in Porirua, Tawa, and the Kāpiti Coast.
They are major urban areas being treated the same way as a remote and hard to staff centre like Dargaville, Dalton said, a d ASMS members had become used to making do with “substandard” staffing levels.
“Normal staffing levels or budgeted staffing levels are not sufficient to allow for sickness, leave, other things that pop up in the normal line of people’s lives.”
She worried that inadequate staffing at Kenepuru’s overnight clinic could increase pressure at Wellington Hospital’s already squeezed emergency department.
Health NZ Capital Coast & Hutt Valley operations director Jamie Duncan said people could still access the clinic for lower-level care on Sunday night, and it was staffed again on Monday night.
“It has had stable coverage of the overnight shift for 18 months,” he said.
“The KAMC is an after-hours clinic for urgent care, which would escalate all emergencies to Wellington Regional Hospital ED and Hutt Hospital ED regardless of staffing of the clinic.”
It was difficult to staff the clinic at short notice during this time of year, said Duncan.
There was “no noticeable increase” in people seeking care at the Wellington or Hutt Hospital emergency departments on Sunday night, he said.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
