Ministers announced the Government’s $604 million health budget to honour a National pre-election promise. Video / Mark Mitchell
A year after he ditched the stethoscope for the steering wheel, dump truck driver Jeff Kai Fong found himself thinking about one of the last patients he treated in a medical career that spanned more than three decades.
The 26-year-old woman was suffering a major anaphylactic response to an allergen and, even after two doses of adrenaline, had “dumped her blood pressure into her boots”, the former emergency physician said.
“She had like a 50 systolic [blood pressure] and you should have like 120. So that means you wouldn’t have a palpable pulse … I managed to get a second [intravenous] line in and we had bags of fluid under our armpits, pumping it into her body as fast as we could.
“She picked up [but] she was 26, so if it went badly that was going to be a f***ing disaster.”
Thinking back on the experience as he drove his 10-tonne, six-wheeler dump truck, the 61-year-old realised how stressful his old life had been.
“I don’t even know how I coped with that. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to it.”
And he won’t be. Kai Fong, an Auckland father and grandfather, is among those this decade who’ve walked away from the high-pressure jobs they’ve devoted much of their working lives to.
It’s not just the acute pressures of helping patients teetering between life and death, but how the overall health system “just grinds you down”, Kai Fong said.
“They change the system every time they change the Government. They never figure out what works. It’s all about management and money … if you under fund something 10 or 20% every year, what do you think you’ll have?
“And then the population just keeps growing. The stress of the job is so bad now that nobody wants to do it.”
Healthcare workers were put under enormous pressure by the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide, including in New Zealand - and the demand for health services remains high.
He’d planned to hold on until the winter of 2022, but instead quit medicine in February 2021, ending a career that included stints as a city and rural GP, running his own urgent care clinic for three years and, finally, working as an urgent care physician at private A&E Shore Care in Northcross, Auckland.
“[When] Covid hit, the winter of 2020 was just terrible because GPs wouldn’t see anyone with Covid, there was no vaccine and [large numbers] were dying [overseas].”
He didn’t feel supported to do the job, and patients were complaining more, so when the various certificates he needed to practise came up for renewal - at an annual cost of about $6000 - Kai Fong decided to “punch out early”.
“At the end I just felt they didn’t deserve my work anymore ... I was completely burnt to a crisp.”