GP Dr Jon Craig moved to New Zealand from the UK with his family in 2005, and found the perfect medicine.

"I moved from the UK to New Zealand, frustrated with the paper-pushing and bean-counting of UK general practice, the lack of family time and missing an environment in which to enjoy what little of that time I had.

Having decided to ditch partnership after five years, I suddenly felt a huge sense of relief and a resurgence of pre-family wanderlust. With two pre-school children, Natalie and I wanted to travel, to find another country where I could easily slot in as a trained GP without too much administrative hassle and was safe and practical for small kids, yet held the promise of more fun than we were having in East Anglia.

Our friends were envious when we decided New Zealand sounded like the perfect medicine for our malaise. And they thought I was quite mad when I explained that I was arranging a new life over the phone and the internet, but amazingly I felt quite comfortable with the process from the outset. We used the net and the experience of friends who had travelled and/or worked in New Zealand to identify where we wanted to be, and settled on Hawkes Bay, on the east coast of the North Island.

There are always plenty of adverts for NZ jobs in the medical rags and I had sent my CV around several agencies: this led to several preliminary phone interviews which were all very positive but nothing really grabbed me until I responded to an advert in the college journal by The Doctors (now Radius Medical) for a position in Napier.

Two things immediately stood out. Firstly, Napier was our hot pick destination. Secondly, the organisation seemed that bit more well-organised than others. The Doctors was (and Radius continues to be) an organisation providing managerial, administrative and development support to practices allowing doctors to get on and do the doctoring. The work would be salaried and the GPs appeared to earn well compared to average even when working a regular 40-hour week.

The recruitment process was easy. I bombarded Susan Jenkins, the Recruitment & Marketing Manager with emailed questions throughout and her responses were always prompt and full. She arranged phone calls enabling long conversations with other GPs, importantly other salaried people who had no reason to hold back on the negatives. After a formal phone interview I was offered the job and the help and support continued through the immigration and registration processes, which as a UK-trained GP with no disciplinary record were a formality albeit one heavy on paperwork.

After the house sale, the packing and the endless goodbyes, we arrived in New Zealand. Radius arranged and paid for motel accommodation for the first week and by week 3 we were moving into a 5-bedroomed beachfront house 10 minutes drive from work. The monthly rent of was easily covered on my salary.

Working at The Doctors, Napier was a breath of fresh air. I found myself in a practice providing an excellent standard of acute and chronic care, with great work colleagues (medical, nursing and admin) yet enjoying the luxury of 15-minute appointments and 8-hour shifts. New Zealand’s health system isn’t perfect – waiting lists and prescribing restrictions are irritations – but being a practitioner here is certainly more rewarding and I found myself enjoying being a doctor again, a feeling I had lost in my UK practice.

Not only did I regain my enjoyment of medicine, but I found that I had time for family and fun. We became thoroughly involved in the local community (much easier in friendly, unpretentious NZ than the UK), made good friends and generally had a ball. We walked, we cycled, we travelled, we boated, we fished. We became Kiwis and were welcomed!

New Zealand is a long way from the UK. But cheap phone calls, technology such as Skype and the ability to get from one side of the world to the other within 24 hours if needed put the distance into perspective.

I met many British doctors during my two years in New Zealand and I can’t recall one who regretted the decision to work there. You may well ask why I’m writing this in the UK. In honesty, we returned because we felt a loyalty to family, especially to our parents, our children’s grandparents. However, confronted by ridiculous house prices and a difficult-to-describe sense of malaise in British society, we’re already considering returning to NZ with the support of that same family.

I would recommend Radius Medical whether you are looking for a short-term position to experience New Zealand or a more long-term life change, and I’m happy to give warts’n’all advice to the interested."

Jon Craig