The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners

Amongst that group are two College fellows, Drs Allan Sinclair and Dominic Bell, and an associate, Dr Maysoon Abbas. We have been in contact with their families to express our sympathy and offer our help in any way. We have also offered each family a cash grant to provide them with immediate assistance. We have extended that offer to the family of another GP employed at the clinic (Dr Husan Al-Ani), who is not a member of the College.

We have also spoken to the owner of the practice, Dr Victoria Flight, who is a College Fellow, and offered our support and assistance to her over the coming weeks. We have offered her the same cash grant.

In a few weeks time, as things return to some degree of normality and the cameras are turned off, we want all Canterbury GPs to know that we won’t forget you and that we will be with you for the long term. We know that many of you won’t recover or bounce back from the quake quickly, and we will continue to do everything we can to help and support you in the months ahead.

Thank You

We would like to extend a huge thank you to all of you who have answered the call for assistance in Christchurch. We can’t turn back time, but we can make sure that we stand strong together going forward.

The College is extremely proud of the generosity demonstrated by our members and our practice nurse and community pharmacy colleagues who have so readily volunteered their time and registered with General Practice NZ (GPNZ) for the Canterbury Earthquake Relief Pool. They now have almost 700 volunteers registered in the pool, and have also expressed their grateful thanks.

We also wanted to issue a reminder to those of you not in Canterbury that many earthquake-affected Cantabrians have relocated to other areas and may be presenting in your general practices as casuals. We are glad to report that a number of networks are supporting these patients by exercising compassion around fees. If you are not already doing so in your own practice, we would urge you to consider doing the same.

Please note that any fee for service claims made for these casual patients will be paid to claiming practices, but will not invoke a claw-back against an ‘enrolled practice’ in Christchurch. GPNZ is awaiting confirmation from the Ministry of Health around the duration of this no claw-back arrangement.

Thank you again to all of you for your support for our Canterbury friends and colleagues at this difficult time.