Prof Wayne Gillett has helped thousands of women with infertility and chronic pelvic pain conditions. He spoke to health reporter Eileen Goodwin about his achievements in medicine.
Prof Wayne Gillett is best known for helping parents to have children when they face the prospect of not having them.
But he is proudest of his contribution to a less glamorous area of medicine - the pelvic pain conditions that are often ignored and misunderstood in the health sector.
The 66-year-old gynaecologist obstetrician recently retired from his Dunedin Hospital role.
He continues, for now, as medical director at Fertility Associates Dunedin, and retains a University of Otago role.
He is pleased his sector-leading chronic pelvic pain clinic will continue at Dunedin Hospital under a new specialist, for whom he will act as occasional mentor.
Given funding constraints its fate had been uncertain, but the Southern District Health Board is continuing the service.
In the past 15 years pelvic pain conditions had been a focus of Prof Gillett's research and clinical practice.
The health sector often failed to understand or even acknowledge them.
"For some reason I think I'm more proud of that.‘‘I've challenged current dogma.
"That's why I've achieved quite a lot - because I've tried to understand it.''
Women were often told the pain was "in their head'', not a particularly helpful observation about conditions that involve a complex mesh of the psychological and the physical.
"It makes it dreadful for people to deal with when they don't have a supporting medical fraternity to listen to them.
"These people need doctors to listen to them, not to dismiss them.''
He developed guidelines for southern GPs to deal with chronic pelvic pain.
"In the old days - the old days being a year or two ago - people would be in hospital for days or weeks and just be stranded there.''
Doctors had been known to "throw their hands up in horror'' instead of dealing with pelvic pain conditions in a rational way.
Greater availability of counselling and physiotherapy services was needed to provide a top-notch all-round service for affected women, however.
Prof Gillett was the first obstetrician gynaecologist in Australasia to be awarded a fellowship of the Faculty of Pain Medicine by the Australia and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists.
Originally from Temuka, Prof Gillett did not come from a medical family but has realised his childhood ambition to be a doctor.
Apart from a five-year stint in the United Kingdom, Prof Gillett spent his medical career in Dunedin.
He trained at Otago Medical School.
In the UK he worked under Lord Robert Winston, who at that time, the early 1980s, was forging his name as a popular science presenter.
This was somewhat fortuitous for Prof Gillett, who assumed more responsibility to allow Lord Winston to develop his television career.
It was under Lord Winston that he developed an interest in micro-surgery techniques to treat infertility.
Micro-surgical procedures had become less important over the years as IVF had become more successful, he said.
Prof Gillett, whose infertility clinical work transferred to Fertility Associates Dunedin when the service was outsourced by the health board, said funding constraints around IVF were tight and some couples missed out.
It was at times "heart-breaking'' for ineligible women.
The cut-off age for public funding was 40 and because of demand, younger women often did not qualify until they were older, which was not ideal.
"We've had to draw a line somewhere and the trouble is we're not wealthy enough to make the line different.''
Working with the Ministry of Health, Prof Gillett developed the national priority model for IVF access which made the system as transparent and equitable as possible.
Prof Gillett believes the developed world could face a fertility crisis, and he intends to focus much of his research on that issue in the coming years.
At present he is working on a paper with other researchers comparing IVF effectiveness in New Zealand and Australia.
In May, he intends to reduce his clinical work at Fertility Associates to a small part-time role.
