Life support

The answer to our healthcare crisis may lie less in increasing the supply of doctors and nurses and more in reducing demand for hospital beds.

- DANYL MCLAUCHLAN

The pain came on quickly. It had been a normal Sunday - gardening, Pilates, cooking - but that night, talent agent Sandra Bestall began to experience a stabbing sensation in her lower abdomen. It kept her awake, and in the early hours of the morning her partner said, “Let’s get you to a hospital.”

She arrived at the emergency department at Thames Hospital at about 6am, where she received timely and excellent care. “Straight into a bed. About 30 minutes later, a nurse came in, asked me questions, went away, came back and gave me a fentanyl shot because he could see I was in pain.

“The doctor - I think he comes down from Auckland - saw me at nine o'clock, came back to check on me, gave me another shot, kept me lying down the whole time. He was really nice. He said, ‘Look, I suspect you've got appendicitis. We'll get you a CT scan.’ Thirty minutes later, I was being wheeled in for the scan. Afterwards he came back, did a little jig and said, ‘Unfortunately, you do have appendicitis - but it hasn't burst. We're going to get you straight off to Waikato this afternoon.’”

Bestall asked if her partner could drive her. The doctor replied “No, stay lying down. You're going in the ambulance.”

Waikato Hospital has one of the busiest emergency departments in New Zealand – 84,000 presentations in 2024 - roughly 230 per day. Overcrowding is constant, especially during winter. In 2017, New Zealand Doctor described the problem of “ambulance ramping” at Waikato’s ED – “when injured or unwell patients arriving in ambulances cannot be unloaded because there is nowhere for them in the department”.

In June 2022, the ED manager apologised to a stroke victim who left after being told they faced a nine-hour wait to see a doctor.

About 5000 people visit an emergency care clinic every day in New Zealand, and many experience a public health system that is clearly under immense strain.

In February,