You’ve seen over the past few months that Martinborough Medical Centre and Featherston Medical have joined forces with Greytown Medical to create a partnership to support our local community. The three entities are now owned by Latitude Health, a fully owned Tū Ora Compass Health PHO subsidiary. Over the coming months, we will be working on identifying opportunities for each practice, and how each one can support the others.
Why the partnership?
Each practice faces many challenges when it comes to workforce, funding, services, as well as increasing costs. Services will continue to operate out of all three locations where they currently are, however, will sit under one umbrella entity.
As one larger entity, we will have more strength to advocate for South Wairarapa, share our resources and streamline and simplify back-office functions such as having one booking system, one patient management system, and one administrative system. Another advantage is the sharing of resources across the three locations.
Some of you may have seen this already, with our Extended Care Paramedic based in Greytown working at Martinborough, and Doctors and Nurse Practitioners working across the three practices. This helps ensure continuity of care with staff sickness, increased workloads and support with additional challenges that may not be planned for.
Our Board
When planning what our partnership looks like, we wanted local community representation to ensure we hear what you want to see in the partnership. The Board met for the first time in July, Chaired by Greytown local Elwyn Eastlake, with Board Members from South Wairarapa to ensure local voice and input.
The board meets six weekly with management to report back on progress, discuss opportunities and bring the community voice to the work plan.
Welcoming doctors working at Five Rivers Medical
The news we know our communities have been waiting for will see GPs working from Five Rivers Medical in Greytown from next week. Dr Emparanza Garcia, Dr Haputhanthiri and Dr Dias will be working some sessions in Greytown and Featherson. Find out more about our lovely doctors below. They are available to their enrolled patients, and are open to new patient enrolments.
What does this mean for you?
Continue booking in with the practice you are enrolled with and see your usual GP or Nurse Practitioner. You don’t need to do anything. Over the coming weeks, we will be working through waitlists and will contact you to enrol if you are on one of our waitlists. Our team are very excited to be venturing into this joint partnership and looks forward to improving health support for our communities in South Wairarapa.