Rural health

Urgent action is needed to ensure rural communities have equitable access to health services. It isn't acceptable to expect people to travel for hours to get to basic hospital care, or to wait weeks for a primary care appointment. It isn't acceptable to promote your city-based 7-day vaccination clinic and then tell me you have no clue when and how people in small rural towns in that (former DHB) area can get vaccines. We have massive GP shortages, to the point that in my growing town new residents have to travel to the nearest city to get enrolled with a GP because local lists are closed. Our pharmacy is only open five days a week - I've been discharged on Friday evening from an ED in the nearest city with a prescription I couldn't fill until Monday because we have no pharmacy services, and the hospital couldn't/wouldn't give me meds to carry me over. Elderly people are "discharged" literally in the middle of the night with no way of getting home because they live an hour or more away from the hospital. Our DHB (or whatever it is now) seems unable to recognise that a huge part of their population lives outside city boundaries, and in fact in some of the most remote parts of the North Island. They are 100% focused on hospital and city services and leave the rest of us hanging. There is only one rest home left in our district so elderly people needing care are shipped off to the city and cut off from their family and social networks.

Rural people have the same rights to health care access as urban people, but we are constantly ignored. Our health matters too.