New Zealand reportedly stands on the second position for having the highest emigration rate of doctors in the OECD. This has resulted in a shortfall of a specialist medical workforce.

The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists has recently released a report that says that New Zealand has the lowest number of specialists per head of population and the highest dependency on overseas trained specialists.

"New Zealand is losing too many of the specialists we are training, the specialists we currently have, and many of the overseas trained doctors we struggle to recruit”, says Executive Director Ian Powell.

The report highlighted the seriousness of the specialist workforce crisis that the public hospitals in New Zealand had been facing. This has further resulted in increasing the work load on the few specialists who remain in New Zealand.

It has been a growing trend of the final year New Zealand's registrars to immigrate to other countries mainly Australia for better salaries. But today New Zealand is deadly in need of an average net increase of 380 specialists a year in order to meet the OECD average by 2021.

Health spokesperson, Ruth Dyson asserted that the paper had been released so that policy advisers, government, media and the general public would have a better understanding of the problem that New Zealand is likely to face in the coming years. The association hopes that the report acts as a wake up call for the Health Minister so that he comes forward and takes some necessary step.