Doctor critical of funding system

By MARTIN JOHNSTON



Dr Alex Williams is thinking about leaving his Auckland health clinic, uprooting his family and moving overseas.

He and colleagues at the Panmure Medical Centre have lost more than 1000 of their 9000 patients in the past year. If that continues, the practice will eventually become unviable, he says.

He blames the Government's two-tier funding set-up for sucking patients away to nearby practices where they pay less - or in some cases nothing if they are poor.

"I have worked in Australia and the UK in the past," Dr Williams says. "If the trend with primary health organisations and the loss of patients continues I would, in the next three to four years, look at returning to one or other of those places."

GPs in New Zealand earn on average $90,000 a year, but 40-year-old Dr Williams, who is married to a GP and has two young children, says that in Britain the average is at least £110,000 ($300,000).

His practice joined one of the primary health organisations - umbrella groups - which receives the lower level of subsidies.

It could join one of the higher-subsidy PHOs to which the neighbouring practices belong, because the area has sufficient numbers of poor, Maori or Pacific people to qualify.

But it chooses to remain in its present PHO, Dr Williams says, because of its stability and the managerial and medical support it provides.