Half of the senior doctors in the emergency department at Wairau Hospital in Blenheim have gone public with a warning that the department is close to collapse, and a day later Health New Zealand confirmed it paid $61,331 to keep a helicopter and crew on standby at the same hospital because no obstetrician was available for pregnant women. Both accounts were reported by 1News reporter Jessica Roden on Sunday 18 October and Monday 19 October.
Wairau Hospital is the only hospital for the Marlborough region, which has just under 50,000 people and an ageing population. The doctors told 1News the emergency department roster was built for 11.4 full-time senior doctors but only eight were working at the hospital. Shifts usually run with two senior doctors, so a single gap in the roster leaves one doctor to carry the department.
“We are crying out and nobody is listening to us,” senior emergency doctor Kay Hall told 1News. The doctors said they had been promised more staff for five years and told each time there was no funding. “You scrape by because you’re lucky and that luck is what is tiding you through more and more which is scary,” Hall said.
Dr Nikki Rolton said something had to change or, in her words, “to be perfectly honest — patients may die”. She said most weeks there were shifts that needed covering, and when nobody could be found they were often left uncovered. The department leans on locums, temporary doctors who fly in, but they are not always available and cost more than permanent staff. “How can there be no funding for the positions when you can afford to pay locums?” Rolton asked.
Dr Ian Munro, who worked as a locum around the country before joining Wairau, explained why the arithmetic does not add up. “It’s not just the hourly rate it comes with flights and it comes with no accommodation and it comes with a rental car,” he said. On the state of the department he was blunt. “It’s at a precipice actually. It’s on the brink of falling over.”
The pressure is not only about numbers on a roster. The doctors said the urgent care clinic next door has had its own staffing problems and often runs shortened hours, which pushes more people into the emergency department. On some days Wairau’s emergency department has recorded more than 100 patients. Unlike larger hospitals it has no intensive care unit, no cardiologist and no ear, nose and throat service, so the emergency doctors end up handling cases that would be passed on elsewhere. “If you come in with something that we need to see within 10 minutes, according to our guidelines, we will get to you probably within half an hour,” Munro said.
Dr Stuart Watchman has worked in the department for almost 29 years and told 1News he would rather not be speaking publicly but felt he had no choice. “As doctors we’ll just try and work faster and work harder. But there is that potential you could make a mistake when you’re working like that,” he said. About half of the senior doctors are nearing retirement, and Watchman worried about what happens when they go. “If we have four or five people up and gone, what’s going to happen? I really worry that I’d have to leave the place in the lurch and understaffed.”
A fifth doctor, who asked not to be named, described a department “living in crisis all of the time” with staff “beyond exhausted”.
Health New Zealand’s newly appointed group director of operations for Nelson and Marlborough, Phil Wheble, told 1News more doctors would be hired for the emergency department and that locums should not be relied on so heavily. “What we’re wanting to do is develop a permanent staff over there,” he said. “That’s the best way of doing things going forward and making it sustainable for the team.” He said the agency had reached that view before 1News began asking questions, and he rejected the claim that the department was on the brink of collapse. “Going forward it’s about making sure we don’t get to that point,” Wheble said. He also said recruiting to smaller regions was difficult and that roles which let doctors work across the emergency department and another service could help.
The second story shows what a staffing gap looks like when it lands on a maternity ward. Wairau usually has four senior doctors in obstetrics and gynaecology, but one resigned earlier this year. Wheble said leave and the resignation combined to create gaps. From the week of 31 August there were periods when a senior doctor was on call for emergencies and other periods when no doctor was available at all. Health New Zealand’s contingency plan was to station a helicopter and crew at the hospital for much of that week so that pregnant women could be moved to Nelson Hospital, more than 100 kilometres away by road.
The cost of that helicopter, $61,331, was confirmed in an Official Information Act response released to the senior doctors’ union and reported by 1News. Interim chief medical officer Dr Derek Sherwood said two patients were flown to Nelson and two more were taken by road. None were transferred while in labour. In a statement Health New Zealand said “Wairau Maternity Service remained open throughout this period and continued to provide midwifery-led care and obstetrics and gynaecology specialist care remotely from Nelson”.
One Marlborough mother, who was due in the first week of September and did not want to be named, told 1News she was warned she would be sent to Nelson if she went into labour because of possible complications. “I was stunned. I couldn’t wrap my head around like how is that possible that there’s no obstetricians?” she said. Her labour stalled once she reached Nelson, and doctors wanted her to stay close, so she waited in a motel until an obstetrician was back on duty in Blenheim. “My husband was having to drive backwards and forwards every day to take me to appointments to the hospital,” she said. She eventually gave birth at Wairau and praised the staff, but said nobody else should have to go through the same thing.
The emergency doctors found out about the obstetrics gap the hard way. Rolton said the first she heard of it was when she arrived at work on the Monday morning. An email had gone out late on the Friday night, but staff who were not working over the weekend did not see it. “It’s scary for me I’m not an obstetrician and things can go wrong very very quickly and where’s the first place that they will come? They will come to the emergency department and… I’m not able to deal with that,” she said. Hall questioned whether a standby helicopter was really a solution. “We’re like ‘well that’s great but you know helicopters can’t fly if it’s too windy or if it’s foggy?’”
Wheble acknowledged the plan could have been communicated better and said he hoped there would not be a gap like it again. A fourth doctor has been hired for the department and is due to start in January, 1News reported.
None of this is new to Marlborough. In September 2025 the Nurses Organisation obtained Health New Zealand’s own staffing data, after the Chief Ombudsman found the agency had unlawfully withheld it, and Marlborough Now reported that Wairau’s emergency department had been understaffed for 48.96 per cent of shifts between January and October 2024. Critical care was understaffed for 38.47 per cent of shifts over the same months. Those figures are now two years old, and the doctors’ account suggests little has changed since.
According to Health New Zealand’s own description, Wairau runs a 24-hour emergency department and a secondary birthing unit able to care for women with complex pregnancies, and Marlborough patients who need specialist care not available locally are sent to Nelson. For a region at the top of the South Island with a growing retiree population and a long drive to the next hospital, the question the doctors are putting to Health New Zealand is whether that model can hold with eight senior doctors doing the work of eleven.
Have you or your family used Wairau Hospital’s emergency department or maternity service this year? Tell us about your experience 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 🙂
Leave a Reply