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We’re on the road, and there’s a lot to talk about - let’s chat.

The Save Our Public Health Roady has left the building.

Malcolm Mulholland and David Galler started at the bottom of the country this week and are working their way north, stopping in towns and cities along the way to ask a fairly simple question.

What the heck is going on with healthcare where you live?

Because we hear plenty about targets, budgets, restructures and plans from the people in charge of delivering our public health.

But we want to hear what that actually looks like when you need a GP. When your local hospital is short-staffed. When a service disappears. When you’re waiting months for care. Or when the people trying to provide that care are wondering how much longer they can keep doing it.

So Malcolm and David have hit the road.

And if the Roady is coming to your town, we’d love you to come along. Bring a friend, bring your questions and come tell us what’s happening to healthcare where you live.

Full Roady Schedule is here.

Here’s what people have been saying so far.

Invercargill - good care, if you can get to it

In Invercargill we heard about services that are working well, including a local health provider offering a model people value.

But we also heard serious concerns about access to hospital and specialist care.

The hospital is too small. Specialist services are stretched. People talked about urology, gastroenterology and ENT services with too few specialists and enormous waits for care.

There are good people doing good work.

There just aren't enough of them.

Gore - four years is a very long time to wait

Gore has its own community-owned charitable health service, another local model doing good work.

But once again, access is the problem.

We heard from someone who had waited four years for back surgery.

Four years.

Anyone who has lived with serious back pain knows that isn't just a date sitting on a waiting list. That's four years of trying to work, sleep, move around and live your life while waiting for treatment.

Another person told us they had waited four years for thyroid surgery.

And getting through the front door of primary care isn't necessarily easy either. Local GP books are full and appointments can be difficult to get.

Ōtepoti - what kind of health system do we want?

In Ōtepoti, people talked about the state of the health system, the growing role of private healthcare and whether we're reaching a crossroads in what we want healthcare in Aotearoa to be.

Fixing today's waiting lists is only part of the problem. What sort of health system are we going to have tomorrow? What healthcare will our kids and grandkids get?

Timaru - a “zombie hospital”

A local dentist told the meeting that adolescent oral health is in crisis. He is seeing record numbers of extractions in young people, including cases where all of a young person's teeth have had to be removed.

At the same time, services that once helped children and teenagers access oral healthcare have been stripped back.

And then there was the hospital.

One health worker described Timaru Hospital as a “zombie hospital”.

Another, who has worked there for 30 years, said morale was at an all-time low and burnout at an all-time high.

We heard about mould, deteriorating facilities and staffing shortages so severe there had even been discussion about whether the Emergency Department could continue operating.

“The stairwells look great, but unfortunately that’s not where we deliver the care”

The strange thing, we were told, is that the further up the hospital you go, the worse the building gets.

Usually the top floor gets the flash offices.

Not here.

Christchurch brought another familiar problem in primary care..

A local GP told the meeting that general practice desperately needs more funding and that reducing debt by stripping back services was never going to be a great strategy. And with GP’s nearing retirement age, and very few replacements - we’re in trouble.

Not enough staff, not enough access, people waiting far too long, exhausted health workers and communities worried about what comes next.

And we're nowhere near Cape Reinga yet.

Join us when we reach your town - check out our full schedule here, bring a friend and let’s chat.

What’s happening where you live?

We can talk about what the numbers say. We can talk about funding, workforce shortages and waiting lists.

But we also need to hear from the people living it.

If the wait to see a GP where you live has become ridiculous, come and tell us.

If you work in healthcare and you're exhausted by what you're seeing, come and tell us.

If you've spent months or years waiting for treatment, come and tell us.

If you're worried about what's happening to your local hospital or health services, come and tell us.

And if things are working well where you live, we want to hear about that too.

There are Roady meetings happening right across the country over the next two weeks.

Please come. Bring someone with you. Share the meeting with your community.

The bigger the conversation, the harder it is to ignore.

ALL ROADY INFO IS HERE - DOWNLOAD A POSTER, SHARE OUR POSTS AND WE’LL SEE YOU OUT THERE!

Help us keep going

Taking two people from Bluff to Cape Reinga, organising meetings across the country, getting the word out and making sure the stories we're hearing don't disappear when the Roady moves on, takes money.

If you can help fund the Roady and Kaitiaki Hauora's work, we'd be enormously grateful.

But if you can't donate, you can still help.

Come to a meeting. Bring a friend. Share a Roady post. Forward this email to someone in a town we're heading to.

Every bit helps us get more people into the room.