Rural health hero put patients first

Dr Pat Farry identified lack of locums and the lure of Australian wages as factors in the high turnover of rural doctors. Photo / Oamaru Mail

Patrick Farry, MNZM, rural GP. Died aged 65.

More than three decades as a GP in Queenstown gave Dr Pat Farry a pretty clear idea of the problems that face rural doctors.

In particular, a lack of locums to give doctors and nurses breathing space for holidays or continuing education meant, and still means, that rural doctors are on call at night and at weekends. This is on top of what is often a 60-hour week.

One of the issues that Dr Farry identified was the offer of better pay and conditions across the Tasman.

"The Australians are causing us a crisis - and it's not just in rugby," he said in a Herald interview in 1999.

"Australia is also desperate for more rural GPs, so they have set up a system where they will pay virtually twice what a rural GP can earn in NZ."

Both Dr Farry and Dr Martin London, then co-director of the rural centre for health in Christchurch, said that the overall shortage of locums in New Zealand could be traced back to the number of GPs being trained in New Zealand.

The problem was hardly surprising, they said, when in the early 1990s the GP training programme numbers were halved to 50.

The crisis was countrywide. Dr Upali Manukulasuriya, who died this year, gave up his Taumarunui practice after 20 years for fear that a tired and stressed GP was bound to make a mistake.

In 1999, Dr Vivienne Coppell had been a GP on the East Cape for just over four years, and was the longest-serving doctor in the region.

So Dr Farry did something about the crisis.

While continuing his job in Queenstown, he took on the role of director of rural health in the South Island in 1999. His priority was to try to solve the shortage of doctors.

"It's pretty disconcerting that the same places that advertised maybe two years ago for new doctors and received up to 20 applicants are now advertising and receiving no applicants at all."

Dr Farry was also a director of Otago University's Te Waipounamu Rural Health Unit, and a Distinguished Fellow of the New Zealand College of GPs.

Patrick Joseph Farry was born in Gore, and educated at St Kevin's College in Oamaru and the Christian Brothers' High School in Dunedin. He gained his medical degrees at Otago University.

In 1976 he established in Queenstown what was then only the second medical centre in New Zealand.

Dr Richard Macharg, chief executive of the medical centre, paid tribute to his colleague this week: "Everything that Pat did was about making general practice better for the patients."

In 2007 Dr Farry obtained the funds to set up New Zealand's first one-year rural immersion programme for medical students, to encourage them to work in rural areas.

On Wednesday last week Dr Farry drove from Karitane, north of Dunedin, to Queenstown to help assess some rural immersion students carrying out clinical scenarios. He then headed to Twizel to do a rural locum because no other doctor was available.

He died in Twizel the next evening.

Patrick Farry was recognised in this year's Queen's Birthday honours for services to rural medicine. He is survived by his wife Sue, sons Simon, Benjamin and Jude, and their families.