Waitaki District Health Services (WDHS) and the Southern District Health Board (SDHB) are eight months into official negotiations for a new contract to provide services at Oamaru Hospital after WDHS rejected a proposed 5% funding cut in 2015.
The negotiations have been based on a service review conducted by WDHS and the SDHB. That review was then used to create a draft proposal for a new "Model of Care" for the district.
"This is principally driven and written by the [SDHB]," Dr Rodwell said.
"What is in the draft is certainly nowhere near the level of service we have now."
The first draft proposal was finished in February and staff at the hospital were consulted in March.
The feedback from that consultation period was used to create the current draft document.
In a statement from WDHS yesterday, deputy chairwoman Helen Algar said the general practitioner, and community, consultations at the end of April had changed "negative attitudes" of some at the meetings.
In three sessions over April 27-28, 10 representatives from seven general practitioner practices and about 50 people from more than 30 community groups, health providers, or health-related organisations met the review team.
But Dr Rodwell questioned the viability of the proposal, saying "much of the so-called current proposal probably isn’t viable".
"Knowing how it is difficult to obtain good experienced medical staff in the rural sector, it stuns me that they are rejecting what they have now at what is probably one of the country’s best and most efficient rural hospitals for a model that will probably cost more and deliver less certainly in terms of quality," he said.
WDHS chairman Chris Swann said the review recommendations were ‘‘not shunning what is there right now at all".
"We’re taking what’s there, which is fantastic, and we’re building off it and we’re going to try and make it better," he said.
"It’s not throwing one [model of care] out and putting the other one in."
A joint statement from Mr Swann and SDHB chief executive officer Chris Fleming issued early last month after Dr Rodwell first publicly criticised the process defended the introduction of a "rural hospital medicine specialists model of service delivery" for Waitaki.
The new model for health care would "ensure continuity of rural hospital medical care with the opportunity for training of [rural hospital medicine] registrars to assist with ongoing recruitment of the future medical workforce".
Mr Swann said that he appreciated there was anxiety in the community.
"We are going through this process because we need to go through this process," he said.
"We need to review our model completely.
"It needs to be reviewed. It hasn’t been reviewed to this degree before. It is a very healthy process. And one could say it is overdue."
The current draft document would be updated based on last week’s consultation and a final plan would then be required to be approved by both WDHS and SDHB before the end of June.
The current contract between the two sides expires on June 30.
