Every frontline staff member at the medical centre in Pahiatua says they will hand in their resignation on 16 October unless the organisation that contracts the clinic orders a proper look at how it is being managed.
Nurse practitioner Victoria Perry told RNZ’s Checkpoint on Thursday that the clinic’s 16 staff had reached the point where they could no longer do the job safely. Pahiatua Medical Centre is owned by Tararua Health Group and looks after about 5000 enrolled patients in a district of fewer than 19,000 people.
The picture Perry painted is of a practice that has quietly stopped doing the ordinary work general practice exists to do. Staff who left were not replaced. Preventative screening for bowel, breast and prostate cancer has fallen a year behind schedule. Patients already enrolled at the clinic are waiting three months to see someone. The follow-up tests that turn an odd symptom into an early diagnosis are not happening on anything like a safe timetable.
“By the time they do see someone in our practice, that problem may be overwhelming and be unfixable,” Perry said.
“We’re not responding to those sorts of things in close to safe timeframes. It makes us feel sick to the stomach that we can’t practice like we’ve been trained to do and like we’re ethically obliged to do.”
The nursing roster is the clearest measure of what has gone. “At the moment, what we can’t do is even immunise children or give the flu vaccines,” Perry said. “We’ve got 1.6 nurses where we used to have five. Although the Minister of Health is saying, ‘please go get your vaccines’, we don’t actually have capacity to administer them.”
That gap between the national message and the local reality is not hypothetical. On 1 September Pharmac and Health New Zealand brought forward funded flu vaccination for every child aged six months to under five, a year earlier than planned, because hospitalisation rates in that age group were running higher than in any other. Pharmac’s director of pharmaceuticals Geraldine MacGibbon said at the time that “we’ve been concerned by the recent increase in influenza cases, particularly among young children”. A family in Pahiatua now qualifies for a free vaccine their own medical centre says it has no one available to give.
The primary health organisation that holds the contract has proposed an external review of the clinic’s workflow. Staff do not think that goes far enough. Perry described it as further “bureaucratic delay” that would leave untouched the management decisions she says sit behind the understaffing and the delays. The team wants the review widened to examine the clinic’s management, wants a guaranteed timeframe rather than an open-ended process, and wants reviewers to talk to frontline staff directly and in confidence. They asked for a decision before the end of next week.
“Please, please can you listen? Please can we have more clinicians?” Perry said. “Please can we have more nurses? Please can we have more administrators to support us? It’s not working. We’re at the bottom here, crying out for help.”
PHO chief executive Tony Wai told RNZ all parties, including Health New Zealand, were working together to understand the practice’s challenges and to support both staff and patients. He said the organisation was considering a range of options to keep services going, including workforce support, local clinical cover, telehealth and locum cover where appropriate, and was staying in close contact with partners across the region while monitoring general practice capacity. Wai said the practice remained open and services were continuing as usual.
Tararua Health Group, which owns the clinic, declined to comment.
Geography sharpens the stakes. Pahiatua had an estimated population of 2830 in June 2025 and sits in a district of 18,950 people spread between Woodville, Dannevirke, Norsewood and a long run of farming country. The nearest hospital is in Palmerston North, roughly 40 kilometres away over the Pahiatua Track, and the nearest after-hours options sit the same distance down the road. When a rural general practice stops doing screening and immunisation, there is no second clinic down the road picking up the slack. The work simply does not get done, and it shows up later in an emergency department.
Pahiatua’s situation is unusually raw, but the underlying arithmetic is national. The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners’ most recent workforce survey, completed at the end of 2024 with 1374 respondents, found 35 percent of GPs intended to retire within five years. Thirty-eight percent rated themselves as highly burnt out, an improvement on the 48 percent recorded in 2022, but 70 percent still placed themselves somewhere between moderately and highly burnt out. The college’s earlier future workforce modelling projected the country would be short about 300 GPs within a decade, with rural practices carrying much of that shortfall.
Money has moved, though slowly and not always to the places under the most strain. In June the Government announced that 86 percent of GP clinics had voted to accept Health New Zealand’s 2026/27 funding package, worth an extra $120.6 million a year. That included $45.8 million for a 3.16 percent lift in capitation, the per-patient payment practices live on, $43.7 million to hold consultation fees steady for a year, $18 million in transitional support and $3.1 million aimed specifically at rural practices. From 1 July the formula that splits that money between clinics changed for the first time in more than two decades, taking account of multimorbidity, rurality and deprivation rather than just the age and sex of enrolled patients.
None of that reaches a consulting room without someone to sit in it. The Pahiatua staff are not asking for a new funding formula. They are asking for nurses, clinicians and administrators, and for somebody with authority to examine why a clinic with 5000 enrolled patients ended up running on 1.6 nurses.
The clock now runs on two deadlines. The first is the end of next week, when staff expect an answer on whether the review will be widened. The second is 16 October, the date the frontline team has set for resigning together. If that happens, a town of 2830 people and the farms around it would be left without the practice that has been holding the district’s primary care together, and the 5000 patients on its books would need somewhere else to go.
Have you struggled to get an appointment, a screening test or a vaccination at your local practice? Tell us what it has been like where you live in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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