Lyric Waiwiri-Smith reports from a public meeting held in Upper Hutt on the state of healthcare in a city where residents worry they could die before seeing a GP.

An eight-week wait time to see a GP, closed books, no local hospital, primary birthing unit or after-hours care facility and overcrowding at your nearest hospital – about 18km away – so bad there’s a 71.3% likelihood of  not being seen on time: welcome to the reality of trying to access public healthcare in Upper Hutt.

It’s a city whose bogan reputation precedes it, but its residents also include a growing number of young families and diverse communities, as well as an ageing population on the rise. Housing is set to increase with a controversial project on the fast track, and its theme-park beer precinct Brewtown even brought Six60 to town – but with a severe lack of infrastructure and resources to treat sick citizens, some residents worry Upper Hutt’s healthcare has never been worse, and will only exacerbate under the pressure of a growing city.

One of those is youth and community development worker Sionainn King, who told a crowd gathered at the Trentham Masonic Clinic this week to share their local healthcare concerns that she moved back to the city four years to care for her nana, who was living independently with dementia. She was concerned that during the second lockdown, the local pharmacy hadn’t noticed that her nana had failed to pick up her medication for at least eight weeks.

Securing any in-home care assistance has been difficult, said King. The family struggled to convince King’s nana, who needs assistance in daily activities such as showering and eating, to receive the Covid vaccine, and fought for two years to persuade her to see a doctor. “It makes me sad that our older whānau – and particularly a lot of older Pākehā who don’t live in village situations – fall through the cracks,” she said. “I know my nana isn’t the only one.”

“Who else is suffering when they don’t have advocates?”

Tuesday night’s meeting was called by urban planner and transport adviser Peri Zee, also a mayoral hopeful in the city’s upcoming local election, who said a lack of access to public healthcare was “one of the major things people tell me is missing in Upper Hutt”. “Our 50,000-strong population have nowhere to go when they are acutely unwell,” she told the audience.

The city’s former after-hours care facility within Upper Hutt Medical Centre was discontinued in 2022, after Silverstream Medical Centre pulled out of the pool of providers that helped run it – since then, locals have had to make the 20 to 30-minute drive to Lower Hutt Afterhours Medical Centre in Boulcott, where Hutt Hospital is also based. The hospital is the only one in the region, serving everyone from the most northern parts of Upper Hutt to those living on the edge of Petone beach, some 21.5km apart.

Zee said the now defunct facility had “saved” her epileptic son’s life when he had his first seizure. She said she had no choice but to drive to the after-hours as the other options were a 40-minute wait for an ambulance to arrive from Wellington, or a half-hour car journey to Hutt Hospital while her son’s face changed colour. “The staff [at Upper Hutt Medical Centre] are incredible, but they can only do so much in a broken system,” Zee said.

She said the lack of service was felt more intensely in the poorer northern suburbs such as Timberlea, where the distance between Upper Hutt and Boulcott is exacerbated by a lack of suitable public transport, and some areas don’t have a local pharmacy. She said she had been in conversations with Health NZ and requested a meeting with health minister Simeon Brown, but said the city now “desperately needs local leadership” to ensure change.

Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins – alongside panellists Ayesha Verrall, Labour’s spokesperson for health, the New Zealand Nurses Organisation’s Wellington organiser Jo Coffey and facilitator Josh Briggs – told the crowd he had always found healthcare in the city to be effective. This is because he has had the same GP since he was a child and his children are also enrolled with a private GP, he explained.

However, as the local MP since 2008, Hipkins said other residents had shared with him their concerns around the difficulty in enrolling in “overflowing” practices, and that services at Hutt Hospital and the Lower Hutt Afterhours were “hit or miss” with long wait times. He said more available urgent care across the Hutt Valley would ease pressures on the emergency departments (EDs), where patients who should instead be seen by a GP are adding to overcrowding.

Former health minister Verrall said she had seen myriad situations similar to Upper Hutt’s around the motu in the last 12 months. She pointed to hospitals in Dargaville and Buller, where a lack of staff had significantly impacted access to healthcare – local governments should be investing in health and then collaborating with central government for support, she said, but it wouldn’t address the lack of staff.

“It’s not the fact that if an after-hours opened in Upper Hutt, Health New Zealand would be able to pay for the patient volume,” Verrall said. “We will never be able to build enough white boxes to accommodate very sick people big enough for our country, we have to keep investing in primary care in the community to keep people well.”

Coffey said EDs around the Wellington region were turning into “mini wards”, with some patients waiting up to three days to be seen in an “overwhelming” environment. “There just isn’t the space for the amount of people that are coming through,” she said, a reality worsened by the fact that nurses aren’t being replaced when they leave their roles, as well as a lack of Māori and Pasifika nurses and Health NZ’s pause on safe staffing ratios.

Resident Paul Bryant, 76, told the crowd he recently enrolled with Upper Hutt Medical Centre because it was closer to home, but the centre’s eight-week wait time to see a GP had been an “incredible” discovery. As a pensioner, he said paying $70 to see his GP was “heartbreaking”, and his GP only infrequently reopened his calendar to take more bookings.

“That’s absolutely hopeless,” Bryant said. “You’ve got this tug of war going on: you can’t afford to go, but you need to go.”

The city once had programmes designed to encourage residents to keep fit, but a rate increase saw the initiative scrapped – a loss which Bryan said has resulted in fewer residents feeling healthy. He also suggested medical centres should be funded according to the number of patients they treated, rather than how many were enrolled.

“If Upper Hutt City Council works with the health centre, [then they can] actually support the health centre to actually provide a better service,” he said. “We need local community solutions”.