Research offer too good for medical leader to stay

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

New Zealand is losing a world leader in pain control to Australia because we cannot compete with international research opportunities.

Professor Stephan Schug has been lured to a job at the University of Western Australia and the Royal Perth Hospital, starting in February.

Yesterday, he took a swipe at what he said were New Zealand's low academic standards, lack of commitment to research, and efforts to commercialise healthcare and education.

The German anaesthetist and pharmacologist came here in 1988 from the University of Cologne, where he ran the cancer pain management unit. He developed the highly respected Acute Pain Service at Auckland Hospital and was this year made a full professor of anaesthesiology at the Auckland Medical School.

He is in constant demand as a speaker on the world academic circuit and is a leading advocate of using "regional" anaesthesia and epidural pain relief after surgery. He has shown that they reduce the number of post-operative deaths and complications such as bleeding and kidney failure.

He has also been voted lecturer of the year in the past by students at the medical school.

News of Professor Schug's planned departure follows the announcement by the former Heart Foundation medical director, Associate Professor Boyd Swinburn, that he will leave for a research post in Melbourne next year. He, too, said health research here was hugely underfunded, investment per head about a sixth of the OECD average.

Professor Schug said his decision was mainly an academic one. Pay was not a factor. In Perth, it would be the same figure as here, but in Australian dollars.

"The prospects at the Auckland Medical School at the moment are not very good for anaesthesiology ... We love New Zealand so we wanted to stay. If you reach a point where the offers are so overwhelming, and in a city as nice as Perth ... "

Anaesthetists, the hospital and the medical school fear they will be unable to find a replacement of his calibre.

Dr Malcolm Futter, the local head of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists, said Professor Schug was a great asset, but he had struggled to get adequate research facilities and other support at the medical school.

A medical school spokeswoman said it was difficult to retain people like Professor Schug because of international competition, insufficient Government funding, and Pharmac policies which discouraged drug companies from conducting clinical trials here.

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