Residents in West Otago are worried they may soon be without an after hours emergency service, leaving the community vulnerable.
Photo: RNZ / Diego Opatowski
If you call 111 for a health emergency in rural Tapanui, Millers Flat or Heriot, it's likely that medical staff from West Otago Health turns up to help.
But the medical centre's chairperson, Alistair Body, said that after hours service was under threat.
"Since June 2015 we have been on a series of transition payments, so essentially the funding that we had for after hours service from Southern District Health Board [SDHB] through WellSouth [Primary Health Network] has been decreasing," he said.
"In June 2017 all after hours funding stopped, so West Otago Health has been funding 100 percent of the after hours funding since."
In a statement, SDHB's chief executive, Chris Fleming, denied making any funding changes to West Otago Health.
"SDHB has not made any changes to funding for West Otago Health Service," he said.
"We understand however that rural funding which is allocated across the district by WellSouth Primary Health Network contained some transition funding for a two year period to enable West Otago Health Service to reorganise how it was delivering its service to within available funding."
"This transition period has finished," said Mr Fleming.
The medical centre now faced an $80,000 cost per annum to keep the service going.
Alistair Body said it simply could not afford that.
"Given that we are a small practice, we are only 2300 people in the community, while we have been wearing that cost at this stage, we have reached a crossroads," he said.
Mr Body said emergencies attended by medical staff range from farm accidents to car crashes.
There were 550 emergency calls attended to by West Otago Health in the last 12 months.
About half of those were out of hours.
St John and firefighter volunteers would have to fill the gap, Mr Body said.
"Our fire brigade in our area ... and our local St John volunteers ... are now going to be left in the unenviable position of being 'Johnny on the spot' with all of these serious accidents," he said.
Clutha's mayor, Bryan Cadogan, said it was not good enough that funding was not available for the service.
He said that was even more of a problem in small rural communities such as Millers Flat, which was 80.4 kilometres away from the next closest medical centre in Gore.
"If due to the funding cuts they would not be there, the call would got back to a fireman or an ambulance staff ... to just have that extra burden and extra pressure, I believe West Otago deserves better than that," he said.
Unless funding is found the emergency service will close in June 2018.