A group of Queenstown health professionals plans to come up with an alternative to the Southern District Health Board's (SDHB) proposed shake-up of Lakes District Hospital.
Wakatipu Medical Centre general practitioner Val Miller said the group, including a general practitioner, doctors, nurses and midwives at the hospital, wanted to offer the community a better solution.
"We are at the very early stage but we are talking about it and saying: `There must be ways around this'. We are going to talk about an alternative strategy," she said.
"We have to have more discussion and research takes a lot of time. What we want is a solution everybody can live with."
The SDHB's consultation document "Delivering Wakatipu Health Service in The Future" proposes refurbishing Lakes District Hospital into an Integrated Family Healthcare Centre governed by a board of community representatives and providers.
It would be a one-stop-shop for health services where all patients would be initially assessed in a general practice, with only emergency cases admitted to the emergency department.
While submissions closed in April, Dr Miller said it was not too late to come up with a new plan.
"It is still a discussion document. It needs to be passed by the board and presumably ratified by the health department.
"The board could look at the submissions and decide to make major changes to the proposal and make it much more palatable - we just don't know," she said.
"We are trying to get our heads together to improve the hospital as it is now with more cost-effective avenues of generating income."
SDHB chief executive Brian Rousseau was "very supportive" of the discussions.
"The hospital doctors have put in a submission. They are the people who will be affected most. I'm involved because I have had quite a lot of community encouragement, particularly from patients who say there needs to be a different look taken," Dr Miller said.
The group would be meeting this weekend to produce a working plan.
Dr Miller said the board's proposal was not in the interests of the community.
"It gives whoever controls the general practitioner section at the hospital the opportunity to vet who goes through into the hospital and because the general practice is private it creates a situation where the person who has a financial interest is making the decision whether the person goes into the free service or not. That's not an ideal situation."
The Ministry of Health's policy strongly stated against such a "conflict of interest", she said.
"That situation doesn't work in the interest of the person getting health care because a general practitioner would have an interest in keeping the person in the private system longer than they should be. It does concern me if people are being told by a GP: `You're not sick enough so you have to pay me to treat you'," she said.
The health care system in Queenstown had a "few problems" but worked well.
"The fly in the ointment is the DHB feels Lakes District Hospital is costing them money," she said.
The Government should be lobbied to change the rules to allow public and private providers to work together.
"They [The SDHB] could be leasing facilities to private specialists and making money, which seems more logical. We should be lobbying Government and the health department to look at those rules rather than get around it by making the whole facility private," she said. The SDHB wanted "a quick fix".
Dr Miller has worked as a GP in Queenstown for 30 years; 15 at Queenstown Medical Centre for 15 years, two years as a locum, then as a centre partner. She was not speaking on behalf of the practice or the group of doctors. She said hospital doctors disliked the proposal and did not want to be "swallowed up in it".
• At yesterday's inaugural meeting of the Southern District Health Board in Invercargill, CEO Brian Rousseau said he was collating Queenstown health plan submission feedback and would soon give a report to board members.
