The front door is jammed shut
The government’s own data tells the story plainly. 25.7% of adult New Zealanders reported being unable to access their GP in a timely manner, according to a March 2025 Ministry of Health factsheet. For children, the figure is 18.5%.
General practice teams deliver 24 million patient encounters annually, dwarfing the 1.4 million ED visits and 1 million outpatient appointments combined. When that system becomes inaccessible, the pressure does not vanish. It migrates, at vastly greater cost, to emergency departments and specialist services. Or it stays inside your business, manifesting as presenteeism, extended sick leave, and chronic conditions that should have been caught early.
Dylan Mordaunt, a research fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, wrote in February 2026 that underpaying for primary care time is ‘a catastrophic false economy.’ His analysis is direct: the pressure simply moves from primary care to somewhere more expensive.
One in five practices losing money is not a stable system
The GenPro Annual Pulse Survey published in October 2025 found that one in five general practices lost money in the prior year, one in four said their financial position worsened, and 85% had recently increased or were about to increase fees. GenPro chair Dr Angus Chambers described general practice as ‘out of intensive care but still in the recovery room.’
The improvement from two years earlier, when four out of five practices were struggling financially, is real but fragile. Two out of three practices now charge patients for previously free services. More than half have unfilled doctor vacancies.
Independent analysis by Grant Thornton, published in August 2024, found that government funding increases fell short of cost pressures 10 times in the past 20 years. The cumulative damage: funding would be $102 million a year higher if the government had followed its own agreed methodology.
The workforce gap cannot be bought out of
In mid-2024, Dr Bryan Betty, then-chair of General Practice New Zealand, estimated the country was short of 300 to 400 GPs. New Zealand should be training 300 specialist GPs annually but had been producing around 200. Training a GP takes at least 11 years. No funding injection, however generous, closes that gap quickly.
In 2023, NZDoctor documented the compounding factors beyond funding: workforce shortages, an ageing population, devolution of hospital services without accompanying money, and an outdated capitation formula. Then-GenPro chairman Dr Tim Malloy warned in August 2024 that workforce issues confronted for 30 years were ‘currently coming home to roost’.
The government’s biggest-ever boost still leaves a deficit
The 2025/26 funding round is substantial. Health New Zealand committed $180 million in new funding, delivering a 9.69% total uplift combining a 6.43% capitation increase with a new $60 million contingent capitation stream. The government’s March 2025 factsheet puts the total package at $285 million over three years.
A structural reform from July 2026 will shift funding to reflect patient complexity, socio-economic deprivation, and rural location. That is the right direction. But it arrives into a system where one in five practices still cannot break even and more than half cannot fill their rosters.
What this means for the businesses paying the bill
Mordaunt’s February 2026 analysis explains why this matters beyond the clinic. New Zealand’s primary care model runs on a hidden cross-subsidy where complex, time-intensive care for the sickest patients is financially propped up by high-volume transactional care for healthy ones. When funding is squeezed, those subsidies collapse and the highest-need patients lose care first.
Those highest-need patients are disproportionately older workers, employees with chronic conditions, and workers in regions with thin GP coverage. Precisely the demographics where workforce retention is already hardest.
Employers who assume the public system will keep their workforce healthy are making an increasingly expensive assumption. The GP system is the shock absorber for workforce health. When it fails through access barriers, rising costs, or closed books, the cost moves to businesses through higher absenteeism, costlier private cover, and a workforce that arrives at acute illness rather than managing conditions early. In 2023, Dr Samantha Murton noted that primary care receives just 4-5% of the health budget but delivers 90% of care. That ratio was never sustainable. Now employers are discovering what happens when it breaks.
Sources
- Factsheet: Primary Care Funding Boost (2025-03)
- General practice ‘out of intensive care but still in recovery’ (2025-10-08)
- Primary care prevents health problems from becoming more expensive – why doesn’t NZ fund it properly? (2026-02-24)
- GPs ‘in crisis’ – and patients paying the price, survey shows (2024-08-28)
- The doctor won’t see you now (2024-07-22)
- Annual Primary Care Funding – Health New Zealand (2025-06-23)
- Annual statement of reasonable GP fee increases – 2025/26 update (2025-06)
- Anatomy of a crisis: Layer cake of woe built on workforce and funding shortages (2023-10-11)
- First GP practices likely to fail as ‘disaster’ looms (2023-06-13)