In 1972 Dr Jack Wong and Dr Peter Bell built Te Waiora Medical Centre on this site. This was one of the first purpose built medical centres in the country, in the days when many GPs worked out of a surgery attached to the house. They were joined by Dr Mike Bowen in 1975, who was still here when he retired in 2018. He shared his practice with Dr Gill Stonelake for the last few years until it was taken over by Dr Lou Spellman. He soon established a busy practice by delivering babies and pursuing an interest in sports medicine, caring for local and national rowing and rugby teams – he was the All Black doctor on the infamous 1995 World Cup tour to South Africa. Other doctors in the 1980’s included Duncan Steed, Mark Vaughan, Kate Buchan, Jocelyn Tracey and Richard Alexander.
The Centre outgrew the building largely because of the expanding roles of the practice nurses who needed rooms, not only to do new patient health checks, dressings and immunisations, but to do smears, diabetes education, ear suction, travel advice, manage recalls and so on. It was expanded and fully refurbished in 1993 with the installation of a computer system, which allowed the gradual adoption of paperless notes – we take this for granted now, but it was a major advance at the time.
The New Clinic
Malcolm Carmichael took over from the late Peter Bell when he retired due to illness in 1989. Chris Nihotte and Pat Scarlet joined us in the 90’s. Linda Rademaker, then Dot Smythe were also partners for some years. Claudia Ho-Peng started as a long term locum in 2012 taking over from Julie Price and is still with us. When Jack Wong retired in 2014 Hamish Seton did his locum until Vijay and Meena Srivastava and Louise Spellman joined us and became partners.
General practice continued to become more complex and after 20 years the refurbished building was no longer adequate. The partners and Jack Wong took a (very) deep breath and went into partnership with Zac and Tonchi Urlich to build the wonderful new clinic which is providing your medical care today. In order for us to stay open it was built in two stages each taking six months. The first half was built on the next two sections down the road, then we squeezed into this so they could demolish the old medical centre and complete the building. We are delighted to have Hamilton Radiology providing on the spot X-Rays and Glenview Pharmacy have opened a dispensary with the latest pill counting technology to speed up filling your prescriptions.