Andrew Dickens: Why the plan for a new Waikato medical school might not work

It's beggars belief these days when we report that it's hard to make money in a GP practice and that we don't have enough doctors. Primary medical care is the most important care, forget your fancy specialists and rock star surgeons. If your GP can spot and fix a problem as it begins then you can save your life and save the nation a ton on costs down the line so the health of our primary health sector should be of primary importance. But it hasn't been. We've added a million people through immigration over the past 10 years and we've also been creating new New Zealanders ourselves while our numbers of doctors per head of population has plummeted. There's two ways to get new doctors. One way to find them is to import them but that's necessarily difficult because not every Tom Dick and Harry who say they're doctors are in fact doctors. The other way is to train them ourselves and in that area we've been woefully short on numbers. I don't know why, you'd think our doctor training would increase in line with population but it hasn't. And what about the University of Waikato’s new medical school? This was an election policy. It was pushed by the university and supported by the government. Well we’re a year into a new administration and where is it?  The medical unions are saying this is taking too long. The Prime Minister says work is continuing on the business case and it will go to cabinet in the future. But unofficially it is understood that the project has been dogged with problems and is increasingly seen as an unnecessary, costly, and bad idea.  I’m sorry, a bad idea? From well paid consultants? From Steven Joyce? Steven Joyce has many good ideas but this is proof that like everyone not all of them are gold. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.