“I don’t even know how I coped with that. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to it.”
And he won’t be. Kai Fong, an Auckland father and grandfather, is among those this decade who’ve walked away from the high-pressure jobs they’ve devoted much of their working lives to.
Healthcare was among sectors hit hard by worker shortages even before the burnout-inducing Covid-19 pandemic, with a Health New Zealand – Te Whatu Ora briefing to Health Minister Dr Shane Reti in January showing the country is short almost 500 GPs, and that number could double in the next 10 years.
It’s not just the acute pressures of helping patients teetering between life and death, but how the overall health system “just grinds you down”, Kai Fong said.
“They change the system every time they change the Government. They never figure out what works. It’s all about management and money … if you under fund something 10 or 20% every year, what do you think you’ll have?
“And then the population just keeps growing. The stress of the job is so bad now that nobody wants to do it.”
He’d planned to hold on until the winter of 2022, but instead quit medicine in February 2021, ending a career that included stints as a city and rural GP, running his own urgent care clinic for three years and, finally, working as an urgent care physician at private A&E Shore Care in Northcross, Auckland.
“[When] Covid hit, the winter of 2020 was just terrible because GPs wouldn’t see anyone with Covid, there was no vaccine and [large numbers] were dying [overseas].”
He didn’t feel supported to do the job, and patients were complaining more, so when the various certificates he needed to practise came up for renewal – at an annual cost of about $6000 – Kai Fong decided to “punch out early”.
“At the end I just felt they didn’t deserve my work anymore … I was completely burnt to a crisp.”
Credit: Source link
