Photo: Unsplash / Hush Naidoo Jade
Work is proceeding slowly on a national support framework for junior doctors, in the hopes of keeping more onshore.
One of their two unions, the Resident Doctors' Association, said in April that resources to set up one up could be on hand within weeks.
But Te Whatu Ora said it was still "at the early stages of the concept".
It was looking at appointing someone to lead a project to set one up, and the timeframe, it said on Thursday.
It was envisaged a framework would coordinate across medical specialities better, and give doctors more of an idea of where they will end up in a job - often they have little job security as they approach the end of their years-long training, during which they move from centre to centre.
The unions say job insecurity contributes to a doctor drain.
Consulting with staff and unions would carry on around developing a "stronger" resident medical officer support service nationally and locally, the health agency's Dan Pallister-Coward said.
Agency records show that prior to April there was only a single meeting with unions at which this came up, and there had not been any other communications about coordinated junior doctor training.
In April, Resident Doctors' Association's national secretary Deborah Powell said coordination across all the specialist streams was aimed to help both planners and doctors themselves.
"So it'd be nationally coordinated - we would be managing who we had going into training programmes where they had to be allocated in order to complete their training requirements, how they're progressing through the training programme, and ultimately guaranteeing them a job as an SMO (senior medical officer).
"We would know exactly who was graduating when and where, because we would have been assisting them progress through their training programme for the past five years. And so we know exactly what our production of SMOs is," Powell said.
Knowing they had a job, and where, two or three years out, would let junior doctors plan their family life - "so there's a lot to say for this system".
