About Grey Base Hospital
Grey Base Hospital, located in Greymouth on the West coast of New Zealand’s South Island, is a modern hospital with experienced staff and support services. The hospital offers a variety of specialties, including; general surgery, orthopaedic treatment, anesthetics, obstetrics and gynaecology, general medicine and community health services.
There are three spacious operating theatres at the hospital, which are described as having the “best views in the world.” There are four consultant General Surgeons working either full-time or part-time at the hospital. Outpatient clinics for surgical patients are held in Greymouth and peripheral clinics are held in Hokitika, Westport and Reefton. The department also provides an upper and a lower GIU endoscopy service to the West Coast region. Close links are maintained with the tertiary referral hospital in Christchurch and patients are referred for both outpatient and inpatient services, so students should not expect to work with very complicated cases on an elective here.
One of the other key departments at the hospital is Obstetrics and Gynaecology, which is a small but vital unit for health care on the West coast. Doctors working in this department care for women spread over a distance greater than that from Auckland to Wellington, which is a large swath of remote areas. The staff at the hospital provide maternity care for the delivery of normal pregnancies, assisted vaginal deliveries and caesarean sections; some 360 deliveries a year, although a small proportion of high risk pregnancies are referred to Christchurch Women’s Hospital. The unit participates in the weekly hospital continuing medical education programmes, the hospital monthly morbidity and mortality meetings, monthly caesarean section review meetings, and monthly departmental meetings.
The hospital also has some modern equipment to support practice, including; ultrasound, digital radiology and a recent introduction of a windows-based patient management system , which has opened up tremendous potential for the electronic integration of case notes, general practitioner notes, laboratory and radiology findings.