KEY POINTS:
When my GP sent me for a blood test some abnormalities were found and he gave me my marching orders to head straight to the emergency department at North Shore Hospital.
After a 12-hour wait for a bed and another 12 hours for an ultrasound, doctors found an infection which required surgery.
I was to go under the knife three days before I was booked to fly to Singapore, and my decision to go ahead came only after my meeting with the surgeon, a New Zealand doctor. Had the doctor been from somewhere else - regardless of his race - I think I would have opted to have my surgery in Singapore.
Would this have made me a racist? I think not, although Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres would seem to think so.
Following a series of botched operations by Czech-trained gynaecologist Roman Hasil at Wanganui Hospital, some patients have been unwilling to have foreign doctors operate on them. De Bres said their attitudes were racist, and even called on health boards not to offer them medical services.
But a doctor's race has nothing to do with my decision against having surgery done here by a foreign-trained doctor, and I suspect it was the same for those patients who cancelled their operations.
I think it is more a case of being unsure of the quality of the foreign doctors we have here. As National Party health spokesman Tony Ryall says, New Zealand doesn't have the money to win the bidding war on medical professionals.
So if New Zealand can't afford to pay top dollars to attract the best, or to retain our own doctors, then if we go by the saying "if you pay peanuts you get monkeys" I wonder what type of foreign doctors we are getting. Figures show that foreign doctors commit more serious mistakes. Health and Disability Commissioner Ron Paterson says that in the year to June, 19 of the 36 who breached the code of patients' rights were overseas-trained doctors.
Our inability to retain our doctors has left us in a situation where our health system is critically dependent on foreign professionals. A Christchurch surgeon, who practised in Taiwan, told me that doctors there get three times what New Zealand surgeons earn.
High salaries are drawing an increasing number of our doctors overseas and 20 per cent have already gone. Besides poor pay - junior doctors are reportedly earning an hourly pay averaging only $22 - doctors in the public health system are being forced to work long hours, with insufficient resources. Ideas such as retention payment, more part-time work, greater support and lowering taxes have been suggested - but all that would amount to little if we cannot pay our medical professionals in line with the rest of the world.
Perhaps it's time we did something unorthodox to help retain those who are still here. A parallel is the way in which some of our schools have gone into international education to increase income. Maybe the health system could profit from "medical tourism".
When I was in Singapore, I met a man from the Middle East who had gone there for eye surgery. He was happy with the treatment but said the city was far from ideal for his six-week recuperation.
New Zealand has the environment, and is well placed to carve itself a niche for people recuperating after treatment. More than 250,000 patients go to Singapore alone in a year - imagine the revenue New Zealand would generate if just a fraction of them came here to recuperate.
Having used the health systems in both Singapore and New Zealand, I can testify that Kiwi medical professionals come up tops, easily.
My experiences in the past month from my GP at Sunset Road Family Doctors, my surgeon at North Shore Hospital, and the Waitakere District nurses, couldn't have been better.
It would be tragic if we lost any of them, and we could never replace them adequately with people from Timbuktu.
