Mt Eden Medical Centre

Description

Our experienced team of Doctors and Nurses give priority to the healthcare needs of their patients We constantly strive to provide the highest standards of professional healthcare in a warm friendly and approachable way

Mt Eden Medical Centre has been serving its community from a landmark villa in Mt Eden village since 1931 The medical centre is wellequipped our staff stays up to date with best medical and nursing practice standards

History

Mount Eden Medical Centre at 457 Mount Eden Road

Mount Eden was settled early in Aucklands history as farmland Wheat was grown and the Bycroft Mill was built in Windmill Road in 1843 One Hastings Atkins Esq acquired the land on which the Medical Centre stands between July and September 1845 as part of a purchase of some 60 hectares Prophetically perhaps he sold 30 hectares in October 1845 for the sum of pound80 to Henry Weekes a surgeon

The house in which the general practice has operated since 1931 was built some time prior to 1882 No other general practice in New Zealand has functioned for so long in the same premises A photograph taken from the slopes of Mount Eden between 1910 and 1920 shows the house clearly with its distinctive three chimneys

The medical influence that was created by Mr Weekes purchase of the land lay dormant until the general practice now known as the Mount Eden Medical Centre was established in June 1931 Dr Edward Roche who had graduated from Guys Hospital London in 1914 and his wife Barbara also a doctor she was an anaesthetist decided they had found in it a gracious family home and an ideal place to start a general practice

Dr Roche started practice in the midst of the great depression and he later recounted

It was right in the middle of the slump and things were very tough then No social security and lots of salesmen wanting to sell cars etc In our first month we took pound16 We stuck it out and eventually it was a big practice In the first year we made more money from playing cards than we did from fees

Dr Renton Grigor joined Dr Roche as an assistant in 1936 In 1940 he moved to establish his own practice further along Mount Eden Road where he remained until his retirement almost 50 years later

Dr Victor McGeorge had enlisted in the Army soon after the outbreak of war but was invalided out following a severe attack of asthma prior to departure for overseas He was then able on Dr Grigors departure to joined Dr Roche similarly as an assistant

Cardiology was Dr Roches first love and it is probable that he carried out New Zealands earliest electrocardiograms at 457 Mount Eden Road In 1942 he left general practice selling the practice and his home to Dr McGeorge to establish his own specialist cardiology practice

Dr McGeorge conducted this practice singlehanded from that time until 1946 During those war years he added a flourishing maternity practice

In 1946 his great friend and former flatmate from student days in Dunedin Dr Albert Butt Adams joined him after serving five years with the Second New Zealand Echelon in Africa and Greece followed by a year as a Medical Registrar at Waikato Hospital

A further Dunedin flatmate Dr Noel Wilson joined the practice in 1949 having also been overseas with the New Zealand Army for five years and subsequently at New Plymouth Hospital Dr Wilson left the practice for a years postgraduate study in Melbourne in the early 1950s

Dr Daphne Adams Butt Adams wife worked parttime in the practice in the late 1970s and early 1980s

In the 1950s they formalised their arrangements and coined the name Mount Eden Medical Centre for the house at 457 Mt Eden Rd Thus was established the first group practice in Auckland and the only one to have survived for so long

The trio continued together until the death of Dr McGeorge in September 1982 after he suffered a heart attack while at work He had seemed to be recovering well in Green Lane Hospital but then collapsed and died suddenly six days after the initial attack Dr Wilson was diagnosed with advanced cancer in December 1982 dying in February 1983 He continued working until two weeks before his death

Dr Tom Marshall had joined the established practice in September 1966 When he and his family took sabbatical leave in 1975 Dr Herman Develter an Irish graduate who had owned his own practice in Derby England acted as his locum tenens On the return of the Marshalls in early 1976 Dr Develter remained with the practice as a partner

In 1976 major alterations of the premises took place An addition was built at the rear of the building and the house at 459 Mt Eden Road which had been purchased in 1970 was joined to 457 All this was done without altering the essential character of 457 either inside or out The heart of the building remains as it was in 1931 No other general practice in New Zealand has functioned for so long in the same premises

Dr Tony Hay joined the practice in 1982 after postgraduate study in the United Kingdom and New Zealand experience in general practice

Following the deaths of Drs McGeorge and Wilson Dr Andrew Chong who had been in practice in Papakura since 1968 joined the practice

Dr Butt Adams retired in March 1984 and Dr Jan White who had returned from postgraduate work in Boston USA took over his practice This established a group of doctors that was to continue unchanged for the next twenty years

More recently Dr Julie Taylor already an established GP in Mount Eden moved her practice to the Mount Eden Medical Centre in 2003 In 2004 Dr Herman Develter retired and Dr Anthony Tam joined the team and in 2007 following the retirement of Dr Andrew Chong Dr Michele Cooper joined the practice

From the singlehanded days of Dr McGeorge and until after the arrival of Drs Adams and Wilson Sister Mabel Ashby was the first practice nurse She was a former maternity hospital owner and the aunt of our pharmacist colleague Mr John Ashby Mr Ashbys father had established his pharmacy in Balmoral in 1938 and supplied pharmaceuticals to Drs Roche and McGeorge John succeeded his father as proprietor of the pharmacy and continued this arrangement until recent times

A notable and much loved figure in the practice following Sister Ashby was another practice nurse Sister Denise Fleming She joined the team in the early 1960s and remained until the effects of terminal cancer forced her to stop work in 1989

Following these pioneer practice nurses the team was ably led by Mary Edgar for a number of years Kimberley Phillips who has worked as a nurse at Mt Eden Medical Centre since 1989 is currently our Lead Nurse

The latest part of the evolution of the Mount Eden Medical Centre has been the development of professional management and reception staff with the appointment of our Practice Manager Rebecca MacCormick in 2004

Since 1993 the country has been exposed to a series of health reforms The latest has seen the establishment of Primary Health Organisations PHOs and the practice has become part of a PHO the ProCare Network Auckland Limited