The Long Wait to Be Seen On Campus

By Phoebe Robertson

Deep in the bowels of the student union building—further still than Salient’s own office—I sat down with Kevin Rowlatt, Associate Director of Student Health, and Laureline Darques, Clinical Lead—Counselling, in Rowlatt’s corner office, a quiet pocket of fluorescent light and stacked folders. I’d come to talk about wait times at Student Health and Counselling, a topic that’s been a steady hum of frustration since I was a student myself in 2020. The complaints haven’t changed much: too long to see a doctor, even longer for counselling, and a sense that help is always just out of reach. I wanted to understand why—and how—it got this way.

A six-to seven-week wait is not an outlier. The service has a typical wait of roughly seven weeks for an initial routine counselling session, with faster access—about a week—for Māori and Pasifika students under an equity priority system. Health appointments run shorter but still stretch the patience of students who need continuity: the average wait to see any GP or nurse practitioner is just under ten working days, with individual clinicians ranging from three to 17.5 days. Nurses are quicker, with an average wait of 3.3 working days.  

The wait times reflect a system squeezed by national shortages, the rhythms of the trimester, and a model of care that has been forced to become reactive. The question facing those who run the service is simple and fraught: What can they do about it, now?

Rowlatt keeps a running account of demand and capacity. In January, he says, it’s often possible to see a GP within a week. But at this point in the year, it’s “just shy of ten working days for any doctor or nurse practitioner.” For the doctor everyone wants to see, it’s longer: “We have one who’s very popular. I think his wait time is 19 working days currently,” he says. “I don’t think any patient should have to wait that long to see a doctor that they want to see.”   

The bottleneck is partly structural. Almost all of the service’s GPs are part-time, a pattern mirrored across New Zealand primary care. Mauri Ora employs 7.5 full-time equivalent (FTE) GPs and a 0.5 FTE nurse practitioner (NP) for a student-to-GP/NP ratio of about 1:1,000—considerably better than the national range of 1:1,600–1,800, yet still subject to the realities of leave and the surge-and-slump of campus life. The team also includes eight FTE nurses, a 8.77 FTE health improvement practitioner and health coach, and visiting specialists from Te Whatu Ora (psychiatry weekly, endocrinology monthly). 

Behind those ratios lies a broader national picture: a shortage of 485 GPs affecting an estimated 775,000 patients. “The GP workforce is increasingly part-time across the country,” Rowlatt says. “In any workforce that is in such high demand and also such short supply, [clinicians] have options about the way and where they want to work.”  

Counselling faces a different calculus: the service is larger (22.4 FTE counsellors, plus interns and casual outreach counsellors) and there is no hard cap on sessions, though it operates a short-term model. Most students attend four or fewer sessions; the average is about 3.8. The aim is to reach many students, while allowing flexibility when needs are more complex and referral options are scarce. “We try to stick to our primary-care scope and not get drawn into secondary,” Darques says.  

Yet time in therapy is not just time on paper. “If someone is highly distressed, with suicidal ideation, or going through a breakup, timeliness is crucial,” Darques says. “Waiting six weeks in a trimester is significant.” For those students, the service runs a same-day stream—typically nine or ten slots, depending on the week—and an “outreach counselling” triage model that aims to contact students within a few days of their first request. The outreach call does more than sort risk; it maps options: group programmes, an e-therapy pathway, a health coach for sleep and habits, or a same-day check-in while they wait for a longer appointment. “We want students to feel heard, validated and connected early in the process,” Darques says.   

The triage approach is not improvised; the service points to a research base for stepped care and walk-in triage models in university settings, and has participated in an implementation trial of internet-delivered therapy modules for anxiety and depression.  

If the current pressures feel acute, they are also the residue of a tumultuous few years. “The model was so disrupted,” Rowlatt says—first by pandemic patterns that crushed routine demand during lockdowns and then unleashed afterward, and then by a wave of GP departures last year for reasons ranging from family to relocations. “We relied heavily on locums, online and face-to-face,” he says. The last of the permanent GPs was only appointed in June. The result: a service remodelled to catch crises—lots of same-day capacity, lots of telephone triage—and less able to protect routine follow-ups that build continuity and trust.  

That reactivity shows up everywhere. Student Health reserves two “duty doctor” clinics each afternoon—22 same-day 15-minute slots, though many students need 30 minutes—and runs a GP liaison to support nurse-led clinics with up to 22 same-day appointments. Nursing operates an acute assessment clinic daily; routine, non-acute nursing care is available in about three working days. Counselling does its own same-day shift most days, flexing between brief letters for extensions and urgent check-ins. All of it helps—and all of it crowds the schedule.  

Add more doctors? “Yes,” Rowlatt says without hesitation. If funding allowed, that is where he would spend first; nurses cannot enrol patients under current funding models, and the external capitation money follows the GP. But just as important, he argues, is to stop letting same-day demand dictate the entire day. “We need to dismantle this reactive model,” he says. That means intentionally shrinking the sprawl of same-day clinics and telephone triage to carve out more protected, routine GP and nurse appointments—the kind that reduce avoidable crises later. 

The corollary is to restore and expand nurse-led clinics for problems nurses can diagnose and treat—sexual health, UTIs, eczema, emergency contraception—and to communicate more clearly to students that their “care team” includes a nurse as well as a GP. “Really, the model we want is: the doctor is the conductor of the orchestra,” Rowlatt says. “Why can’t we devolve some of that stuff to the nursing workforce and allow GPs to do more complex stuff?” 

There are signs this could work. The service did something similar before the pandemic: when nurse-led clinics grew, telephone triage dropped, and GP time was freed for the kind of appointments that keep patients out of the acute stream. They want to repeat that, this time with firmer guardrails: fewer open-ended “we’ll take as many as come in” days, more scheduled blocks, and a conscious substitution of resource-hungry phone triage with face-to-face care. 

Counselling is applying a parallel logic—triage and choice at the front door; variety in what “therapy” can look like while you wait; and rostering that matches the shape of the academic year. This year, staff noticed something new: students were unusually proactive in summer, booking support long before crunch time. That early demand pushed up the queue sooner than expected—but it also signalled a cultural shift the service wants to encourage. In response, they are experimenting with rotating more same-day capacity into known “peak” weeks and dialling it down when campus is quiet. 

The outreach call is the hinge. It’s where a student can hear, concretely, that there are options other than “wait six weeks.” Group programmes that teach skills. A health coach who can start now on sleep and routines. An e-therapy module with brief weekly check-ins. A same-day appointment if the ground has shifted—and follow-up calls if needed, so no one feels they are waiting in the dark. “At least you’re informed; you can navigate that system,” Darques says. “There’s a relationship created with the service.” 

The equity lens is also explicit. Māori and Pasifika students can get an appointment in roughly a week, a recognition that the system must do more than acknowledge inequity— it must build priority pathways into its architecture. (The counselling team says it can still book next week for Māori and Pasifika even when the general queue is long.) 

These choices make the line look longer. This is, in a way, by design. Student Health’s model is “less wedded” to the classic 15-minute appointment, Rowlatt says; many students—particularly those in emotional distress—need 30 or 45 minutes. That generosity of time is humane; it’s also arithmetically unforgiving. You cannot stretch a day without it snapping somewhere. 

The service tries to cushion students outside office hours. The campus clinic runs late Monday through Thursday, and during exam periods, both Health and Counselling open on Saturdays, including same-day counselling. Students can also call the national 1737 helpline 24/7, use the nurse-led Healthline, book a discounted virtual consultation through Practice Plus, or go to the hospital emergency department—free, but often with long waits of its own. None of these are substitutes for seeing the clinician who knows you; all are attempts to make the time in between bearable. 

Could students simply spread out their loyalty, choosing the next available clinician rather than waiting for the popular one? The service resists that logic. “Continuity of care is kind of the gold standard of general practice,” Rowlatt says. Trust matters, and so does not having to retell your story. The trick, then, is to protect continuity without letting it calcify into scarcity. That is the bet behind rebalancing toward nurse-led clinics and reserving more GP time for planned follow-ups. 

If the past few years have taught the service anything, it is that campus health cannot be a scaled-down copy of the clinic down the road. “We are talking about a young and vulnerable population where mental health is our bread and butter,” Rowlatt says. The service, he suggests, has to meet them where they are—not just in the first appointment, but in the weeks when they are waiting, deciding whether to ask for help again. 

In counselling, that has meant making the first human contact feel like more than a triage script. In health, it has meant being honest that 22 same-day slots are not a safety valve so much as a symptom—a pressure release that, if left unchecked, builds pressure elsewhere. Both teams describe the coming months as an exercise in discipline: intentionally shrinking the “drop-everything” part of each day; re-investing in routines that make continuity possible; and giving students clearer pathways that don’t all end in a single line.

None of this obviates the basics. More clinicians would help. New Zealand’s GP pipeline will not be rebuilt by better rosters alone. On this campus, though, staff insist they can make the waits mean less—if not always be less. “We always look at wait time, but it’s one indicator,” Darques says. “The aim is to connect early, offer options, and be there when it’s happening.” 

If the past few years have taught the service anything, it is that campus health cannot be a scaled-down copy of the clinic down the road. Many students are navigating health care for the first time, often without a parent’s health literacy to guide them. The service has to meet them where they are—not just in the first appointment, but in the weeks when they are waiting, deciding whether to ask for help again.

“We aren’t built like the four-doctor surgery that’s looked after three generations of the same family,” Rowlatt says. “We’re working with young people, many of them away from home for the first time, often figuring out health care on their own. You can’t assume they arrive with the same health literacy as someone who has a parent booking appointments and explaining prescriptions.” That doesn’t mean students are passive; staff say the newest cohorts are strikingly proactive about seeking help earlier. But it does mean the model has to bend differently: faster to respond, more flexible in what care looks like, more focused on mental health as a daily reality rather than a side stream.

“It’s a period of life where things shift fast,” Rowlatt says. “That’s why you want to be there when it’s happening.”