Rural GP Anthea Prentice says medical students need to head to the country

Anthea Prentice is a sole rural GP in Cheviot. Photo / Anthea Prentice

New Zealand's rural health system needs more graduates to head to the countryside, sole Cheviot GP Anthea Prentice says.

"We need to get the medical students out and into the country, experiencing life as a rural GP," she told The Country's Jamie Mackay.

Rural communities were crying out for GPs and Prentice believed it would take a while before the numbers were anywhere near where they needed to be.

"It's going to take a long time to replenish the young GP workforce coming through and encourage them into general practice."

One problem was that being a rural GP didn't appeal to urban graduates, Prentice said.

"It doesn't always look the most attractive specialty to the new grads and a lot of city people have never really spent any time in the country."

Isolation was also an issue for young doctors.

"The thought of being over 100km away from a base hospital that's been their place of study can be quite daunting."

All of this led to students missing out on a potentially rewarding career, she said.

"I want medical students to get that experience so they understand how satisfying it can be as a job."

Last week 900 doctors signed an open letter to Health Minister Andrew Little, demanding that the Government face up to a "catastrophic collapse" of the health workforce.

Prentice was at the GP22 conference in Christchurch today, where she said Little addressed the issue.

"A lot of the questions afterwards were how can we get GPs to be on the Board table to actually be informing some of the ministry's decisions and to get our point of view across.

"That's what's been missing I think, through this establishment of the new health authority – we haven't had our voice at the table."

Centralising the health system made it more difficult for rural communities to have access to medical care, Prentice said.

"I think the Government has definitely centralised a lot of the services for health and they are all mostly operating out of hospitals when really … bringing the services out into the community is by far a better way to address some of those disparities around the country."

She said it was "quite a battle" to get medical specialists out to rural areas, including Cheviot, but it was preferable to patients travelling to the city for care.

Listen below:

"[Patients] can just turn up to their local medical centre instead of making that big mission to drive into Christchurch because it's a full day out of work and petrol's expensive and it just gets very difficult."

Prentice said Little's comments at the conference were promising.

She believed he'd got the message "loud and clear", about the rural health workforce shortage.

"Hearing Andrew Little today speaking of really wanting to increase the flow-through from the medical schools out to general practice, and recruiting more GPs at a registrar level and training them specifically to become GPs was quite encouraging."