Tui Ora’s new Lead GP for Whaitara, Dr Gina Kaye wants her community to know that Whaitara Health Centre is fully open for business!
“For a long time, we know it’s been hard to get appointments, and the community has become used to accessing healthcare in other ways, such as driving into Ngāmotu, but please give us a call as from now on we should have a lot more on the day or in the week appointments available,” she says.
The dynamic doctor has brought her passion for whānau care along with a wealth of hauora and life experience to the role.
“Continuity of care is everything. My passion is to bring that back to whānau. I want to provide an environment where whānau can walk in, and know their team, who know what’s going on for them, and their family,” she says.
This is a dream that will soon be a reality with two new GPs starting by the end of September, which means that all Whaitara Health Care whānau will have their own allocated doctor.
It’s a far cry from when Tui Ora took over the clinic a year ago with no GPs and it’s a huge achievement for the kaupapa Māori organisation.
But to create a more all-round service for whānau, there’s more in the pipeline than a full set of GPs.
Dr Gina shares “We’re also looking to embed practices which provide continuity of care by utilising the skills and experience of our entire team and having everyone operating at the top of their scope. We are lucky enough to have a wonderful team with nurse prescribers, a paramedic, nurses, a prescribing pharmacist and others currently in training to be prescribers next year. We also have a health improvement practitioner and visiting specialists. Everyone in the team plays a really core role in providing care to our community.”
“If we create a way between us as a team to look after a patient, then it adds more resilience to the system, and ultimately better and more consistent care for our whānau.”
Dr Gina has already introduced two new clinics to help increase the opportunities for whānau to meet with a health clinician face to face. The Red Clinic is a daily allocated hour during the winter months so whānau can safely be seen if they have respiratory or contagious symptoms such as a runny nose, cough, vomiting, diarrhoea.
There’s also the introduction of the year-round Kama Te Uru clinic, which is run daily Monday to Thursday by Whaitara Health Centre’s paramedic, Sarah Sharp, who can help whānau with a wide range of concerns such as rashes, infections, injuries, sore throats, sore ears, sexual health and urgent care, so they don’t have to wait to be seen by a GP.
Before taking up her new Lead GP role, Dr Gina came to Tui Ora as a locum doctor late last year, so she is familiar with the model of care Tui Ora provides whānau, and it’s part of what attracted her to the position. “A kaupapa Māori healthcare model is something I wanted to be a part of. For me it’s around the holistic nature of the care and the alignment of values. Also, the fact there are so many other areas of Tui Ora that I can call on to support whānau.”
Medically trained at Bristol University, English-born Dr Gina moved to New Zealand 22 years ago with her Taranaki-born husband and five children.
She has experience ranging from training in psychology and medicine, working as a palliative care physician, owning and working at the Green Bay Medical Centre, fostering 12 children that she still keeps in regular contact with, and since moving to Taranaki in 2024, she and her husband have planted more than 10,000 trees on their eight hectare section while they build their dream home on site.
She has plans just as aspirational for the future of Whaitara Health Centre.
“We’re aware there’s still much to do, but what’s happened in the last year is brilliant, and the future is bright for Whaitara Health Centre and the community we serve!”