00:00It was initially my wife that actually suggested that we needed to get out of
00:04the States. That it was she saw the changes that were happening for me and
00:08how I was really doing poorly and she brought it up and recommended that we
00:12look at moving out of the States and we looked around in Europe we looked all
00:17over the place and it was actually recruiting a recruiting email that brought
00:22me to New Zealand. I was working at one of the largest hospitals in Seattle
00:26Washington as a respiratory and critical care doctor as well as doing general
00:32internal medicine and it was pretty full-on. I reached out to a friend who's
00:37working at Palmerston North Hospital that I trained with and she suggested that we
00:43have a look at it and particularly the small towns so that's the main reason why
00:49we came to Timaru. The medical system in the States is horribly broken and frankly
00:55traumatic to practice in as a doctor and then horrible on me and my family not
01:00getting any time with them not getting to be able to recover. So it's been a big
01:05improvement in my practice so I don't worry so much about being able to get my
01:13patients the inhalers that they need or the tests that they need. There's pluses
01:17and minuses to each of the system but I think the system works better for how I
01:22like to practice. Like I said it's so much easier to practice medicine over here to be
01:27able to have all of the supports in the hospital around the patient and outside the
01:31hospital for when I need to discharge a patient who needs ongoing care. We're
01:35certainly needing to work aggressively on hiring. We are eager to have any more
01:40overseas doctors coming in. I know New Zealand's always glad to have more
01:45medical expertise coming in and help filling our ranks of doctors. So we fail to train the numbers of
01:51doctors that we've needed for some time. This is a problem that's actually gone
01:55back decades. We have only two medical schools we're about to increase to a
02:01third and we really need to be growing our own doctors locally but we also need
02:07to be keeping them here and we do a great job of attracting and recruiting
02:13people to New Zealand but we don't keep them here. So the terms and conditions
02:17that our people are working in and that's not just doctors that's all health
02:22professionals. Nurses, allied health people, dentists, podiatrists etc. We don't
02:29do a great job at creating the terms and conditions that make them want to stay.
02:34There is a big pay cut. For me coming from California the cost of living is
02:40actually quite a bit cheaper over here so my money goes a lot further. Having a lot
02:45of the support services for my family having excellent child care for a very
02:51reasonable cost is life-changing for us. That really allows us to do a lot more.
02:57Do you think you'll stay? Have you made that call? Yeah we've been here just coming up
03:02on five years and this is where we live now. We like it. I'm staying. We love it here.
03:07We're here permanently. We're not going anywhere.
Comments