A good decision by David Clark

The Herald reports:

The Government has scrapped plans to establish a School of Rural Medicine.

The previous Government, before last year’s election, promised to create the school in a bid to attract more doctors to the regions.

But Health Minister David Clark this morning announced he had scrapped plans for the school. …

The University of Waikato and the Waikato DHB put forward the idea to the Government and Otago and Auckland Medical Schools also had played a part in its proposal.

Basically this was about Waikato trying to set up a third medical school. This always seemed a bad idea as they had no particular expertise in this area.

Auckland and Otago were strongly against this, and then a compromise was done where they would all work together on it.

But it seems to me it was more a solution looking for a problem, and that any issues around rural health could be done through the two existing medical schools.

So on this issue I think David Clark has made the right call. There’s better things to spend $250 million on in health.