Under spent training funding revealed in the Budget should be used for more incentives to attract doctors and nurses to hard-to-staff rural areas, says the Rural General Practice Network.
Dr Jo Scott-Jones, the network’s chairman, said he understood the $10 million under spend in health workforce training was due in part to lower than expected uptake of the voluntary bonding scheme. (As of March this year only 43 per cent of the 656 nurses who signed up to the scheme in 2009 and 47% of the 115 doctors had stepped forward to claim bonding payouts. A recent review of the scheme noted a “lower than anticipated retention rate”.)
“If this is the case then why not put more resources into incentives to attract young doctors and nurses to rural practices that find it difficult or impossible to attract staff.”
“With permanent vacancies across 25 percent of rural practices nationwide, this would seem a logical direction to take to attract young doctors to these areas,” says Dr Scott-Jones.
He said the recent review of the bonding scheme for Health Workforce New Zealand revealed “glaring gaps” in its outcomes for rural health and that there was not enough emphasis on the placement of young GPs or primary care nurses into rural areas. Scott-Jones said the scheme had also made repeated requests for primary care nursing to be added to the list of hard to staff nursing specialties under the scheme.
