Cerys Lang is certainly a good advertisement for her native New Zealand. Born and bred on Auckland’s North Shore, the practice manager of the busy CityMed primary healthcare complex in the city centre likes to relax with an appropriately antipodean activity – big game fishing.
“I love New Zealand,” says Cerys, speaking from her sunny home by the water near Auckland, where the interior decoration includes artwork of a lobster. “This is paradise.”
It’s mid-autumn in the southern hemisphere and Cerys is just back from a three-week vacation with her husband and son to Houhora, a village at the top of New Zealand’s North Island. With a population of just 174 people in the country’s 2018 census, Houhora has a reputation as one of the best fishing spots in all of New Zealand.
“It’s very remote, about five-and-a-half hours’ drive from where we live. It’s right on a harbour and opens out onto the ocean,” says Cerys. “We towed the boat up, parked up there for three weeks and picked the weather days. It was amazing.”
They fished for snapper, trevally and kahawai, and landed some tuna. Cerys’s only regret is that they didn’t have any lines in the water when they saw marlin. If Houhora sounds like fishing heaven, however, Cerys’s day job doesn’t sound so bad either: she describes CityMed, which opened in 2000 in Auckland’s central business district, as “my comfortable, happy place”.
“We’re a big integrated facility, not your typical GP practice,” she says of CityMed. “We can do bloods on site, we’ve got a pharmacy, we’ve got radiology, we’ve got two operating theatres. It’s quite unique, it’s fast-paced. I can walk in there planning to do something and I’ll get tackled at the front desk and my whole day turns around.”
CityMed has 11 working GPs, six registered nurses, three healthcare assistants and an eight-strong admin and reception team. As practice manager, Cerys is the glue that keeps it together. She is uniquely qualified for the role, having completed her three-year nursing training at age 19 after achieving the grades to get into university a year earlier than most.
After a short stint in hospitals, she joined CityMed as a junior nurse in March 2001, just months after the facility was opened by a team of founder doctors. She became nurse manager in 2008 and took over the position of practice manager after returning from the birth of her son, their second child, in 2015. “We hadn’t had someone with both clinical and non-clinical experience in the role before,” she says.
Her simplest description of the practice manager role is “problem solving”, from printer-fixing to the admin side of CityMed’s finances. “I pretty much oversee all parts of it,” she says, smiling. “I work closely with the nurse manager, the management team and board of directors. I do hiring, firing, approving. I do health and safety, I do complaints. Anything in the building that breaks, that’s on me.”
She reveals that she keeps an “in case of emergency” book of her responsibilities, just in case her colleagues ever need to figure out all the elements of her role. She says that the variety is her favourite part of the job, not surprising when there is rarely a ‘typical’ day at CityMed.
“At a lot of GP clinics you can’t get in for weeks, but we have pretty much same-day or next-day availability,” Cerys explains. “We get a lot of walk-ins, A&E type stuff. There’s a lot of construction in Auckland so we see workers with injuries. We get the odd acute sickness and tourists off cruise ships saying, ‘Oh I forgot to pack my meds’.”
The common theatre procedures range from skin lumps and cancer surgery to open-wound repairs, circumcisions, vasectomies and even vasectomy reversals. CityMed is also approved to carry out medicals for New Zealand Immigration and Australian Immigration.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many nearby hotels were used to quarantine travellers and CityMed was busy with testing, including for diplomats moving internationally. Cerys recalls the pandemic disruption to Auckland’s high-profile hosting of the America’s Cup yacht race in 2021.
As seen around the world, the pandemic served to accelerate the introduction and use of healthcare technology at CityMed, including e-prescriptions and video consultations. Among its technology stack, CityMed uses communications and messaging technology from Konnect NET and the HealthLink messaging communications network, both part of Clanwilliam.
“The biggest change I’ve seen really is trying to get everything electronic and digitised,” says Cerys. “With HealthLink, for example, all correspondence with specialists is in electronic format so we don’t have to open a letter, read the piece of paper, scan that piece of paper and allocate it to a file. That just saves so much admin time.”
She says that tech providers are also getting better at collaborating and allowing their systems to integrate. Some CityMed patients moved out of Auckland during Covid-19 but CityMed can refer them electronically to health services in their new locations. Electronic lab ordering and the introduction of the national Aotearoa Immunisation Register are welcome developments, though there are some frustrations around limited GP access to the register, says Cerys.
As a people-person, Cerys’s least favourite part of the job, she says firmly, is dealing with any patient complaints. “That’s the difficult side of it because I can see why a person might complain but I can also see the clinical side, why something happened a particular way,” she says.
Resourcing is a familiar issue, with many New Zealand health professionals opting to move to Australia because of cost-of-living issues at home. Cerys jumps in to help where needed at CityMed, whether it’s at the front desk or administering vaccinations. “There are a few patients that still come to me because I’ve known them for 20-plus years,” she says. “When you’re nursing, you get to develop those relationships.”
A large healthcare group acquired a 50% stake in CityMed from the founding doctors in 2019 and some of the founders are preparing for retirement after almost 24 years in business. However, they are determined that the practice will continue to innovate and grow, says Cerys.
“The reason I’ve stayed 23 years is that we’ve always had fantastic staff. The owners have been a really supportive group of people to work for,” she says.
In fact, it sounds as if there is only one person that Cerys might swap her job with: her husband. He works in product development for Shimano, the Japanese cycling and fishing equipment company, designing products including fishing rods, reels and lures.
“He has fished the world. I get a bit jealous because he gets to go off to Japan to [Shimano] head office, he goes to China to the factories and he goes to the fishing shows in Osaka – and I get to go to CityMed,” she jokes. “Really, I’m very lucky. The garage is full of fishing kit and we’re two minutes walking from the boat ramp. It’s great.”
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