Te Rau Kawakawa centre opened last year to replace the old Buller Hospital. Photo: Supplied
Buller's mayor says there is concern over the acute care service, also known as the hospital, being inundated with closures since it opened about a year ago.
People living in Westport have been told their hospital will be closed from 5.30pm Wednesday to 8.30am Thursday, due to staff illness. Patients would needing admission would need to go to Greymouth's Te Nīkau Hospital, 100km away.
Buller District Mayor Jamie Kleine told Checkpoint the acute care service had already been through overnight closures about six to eight times since opening.
"Beautiful building, and only opened a little over a year ago but since then has been plagued with issues in terms of securing appropriate staff to keep it open really, which is a huge concern obviously to people in my position but our whole community as well to have confidence in that service."
The community was frustrated, he said, adding they acknowledged the commitment of staff and understood the factors including the national shortage of professionals, but "it just feels like these good people are being let down by our broken system and it just seems something needs to change to give the community confidence again that a really good facility is open for business and here to support the community".
"It's been going on for a reasonable amount of time, I think it had a reasonable window when it first opened that it was all good but it wasn't long in the sort of thin nature of the available staff resource became evident and literally comes down to just a handful of staff members who are unable to come to work because of illness and the like that means our facility gets closed and we do have to rely on that 24-hour service in Greymouth."
In some of the other instances of closures, the hospital was able to get the help of St Johns paramedics, Kleine said.
There was a cycle of rural generalists with Greymouth Hospital, he said.
"I think that's what happens is a couple of people call in sick and they have to keep the main hospital open in Greymouth and so they have to make closures in Buller.
"So historically, what we used to have, my understanding, is we used to have a different class of GPs called specialist GPs were able to cover that service at the 24-hour Critical Acute Stabilisation work as well, so I think we just need to make sure we're not just reliant on the Greymouth staffing."
Buller Health is run under Health NZ West Coast.
Kleine said he acknowledged the hard work of management and medical staff to keep the facility open.
"But, you know, it really is unacceptable really to have a population of sort of 10,000 people relying on that or exposed to that risk of a road or aircraft transport to Greymouth for that acute care."
He said with the community growing from the booming mining sector, people would be looking to good health and education services before making the move.
