Senior hospital doctors have lashed back at Dr Ashley Bloomfield after he claimed New Zealand's health system isn't in crisis.
The Director-General of Health appeared on AM on Thursday after doctors hit out at the Ministry of Health for failing to communicate a plan to deal with the coming wave of other winter illnesses amid the Omicron outbreak.
Doctors are already overseeing the care of tens of thousands of people isolating at home, and say routine care, like overseeing mental health issues, diabetes and cancer care, is being compromised.
Now the risk of flu, RSV, and whooping cough approaches right as New Zealand is opening up.
"I don't think it is a crisis in the health sector. There's no doubt that general practice and, in fact, the whole system is under a lot of pressure at the moment with this big Omicron wave," Dr Bloomfield said.
"We had planned for that and general practice and general practice leaders have been a very big part of that planning. There is a lot of support out there for them to help them through this period and they're doing a fantastic job."
But the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) says senior hospital doctors strongly refute these claims. ASMS executive director Sarah Dalton says those working on the ground would beg to differ, saying it's a crisis by any other name.
"COVID hospitalisations are escalating, routine patient care is being postponed or cancelled, clerical and managerial staff are being asked to help out on the wards, and some staff are being offered special allowances to work extra shifts."
Dalton says it all sits alongside an existing staffing crisis.
"We have emergency departments which are consistently overwhelmed, long waiting lists for specialist services and in some parts of the country patients have no access to a neurologist, dermatologist, or rheumatologist. Omicron simply underlines how unsustainable staffing shortages are."
And she says there is no relief in sight for a tired and burnt-out health workforce.
"Once the Omicron surge is over there will be the long and added burden on clinical staff to catch up on the backlog of deferred operations which will take years," she says.
ASMS says it has long warned of a parallel crisis among hospital specialists. In 2018 the largest group of specialists was aged between 55 and 59 years. On top of our ageing senior medical workforce, if we want to catch up with Australian staffing levels, New Zealand needs an additional 1500 specialists right now, it says.
"The decades-long failure to undertake focussed workforce planning and investment is now taking a massive toll on our remaining healthcare workforce," Dalton says.
"This is a health system crisis which can no longer be ignored."
Royal New Zealand College of GPs medical director Dr Bryan Betty said on Wednesday that GPs are extremely busy.
"General practice is very much at capacity. GPs are dealing with a very, very large workload," he said.
"The Ministry [of Health] and the Government does need to start providing clarity over what is going to happen over the next three, six, 12 months. We need to see a strategic oversight of how to deal with the backlog of issues."
Auckland University vaccinologist Associate Professor Helen Petousis-Harris says every year these other winter ailments - such as the flu, RSV, and whooping cough - kill people and usually we're in better shape to face them.
"I think we are going to be caught at a time of great weakness," she says.
For example, when it comes to whooping cough, only 53.4 percent of Maori aged six months are vaccinated, 66.8 percent of Pacific babies and overall only 74.1 percent of all infants.
"We've got burnt out healthcare. We've got very low vaccine uptake and we've got a whole bunch of diseases that are knocking on the door," Petousis-Harris says.
