Doctor Awarded Prestigious Entrepreneur Of The Year Award

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Doctor Awarded Prestigious Entrepreneur Of The Year Award

Doctor and founder of successful medical recruitment agency, Dr. Sam Hazledine, has today been announced winner of the prestigious Ernst and Young ‘Young Entrepreneur Of The Year’ award.

The award is New Zealand’s most prominent global business award aimed at recognising successful entrepreneurs and highlighting their contribution to the New Zealand economy.

Dr. Hazledine is the managing director of MedRecruit, a medical recruitment agency he started in 2006 specialising in working with doctors to place them in locum and permanent positions so they can have it all – career and lifestyle. Over the past five years Sam has transformed the medical industry to give doctors back their lifestyles, and in doing so has positively impacted the provision of healthcare throughout Australasia.

“I’m absolutely thrilled to be announced winner of Ernst and Young’s ‘Young Entrepreneur Of The Year’ award. It acknowledges the fantastic work of the team at MedRecruit and the belief the doctors and hospitals place in us to provide what they need right now - namely the ability for doctors to go further with both a life and a career, and providing hospitals and GP Practices with certainty and confidence in their staffing”, Dr. Hazledine says.

Chief judge Greg Cross, from Icehouse, says the finalists were the most articulate group of finalists the panel has ever judged.

“It’s always hard to compare one year with the next but across the board, the level of presentation and the standard of the businesses was the best we’ve seen. As is always the case, the passion of these people is phenomenal,” Mr Cross says.
“The Young Entrepreneur category in particular, was very hotly contested. It’s just fantastic to see young people coming through and making our job as judges really difficult. But ultimately, like any business, it comes down to the numbers. You’re looking at the top line, you’re looking at the bottom line, and you’re looking at the growth potential”

Dr. Hazledine has been close to winning this award in the past having been named a finalist in 2008. “The judges gave me some great advice in 2008 and we’ve applied that successfully to grow MedRecruit. It’s exciting to be running a fast growing business that is having such a positive impact for our clients and beyond; that’s what keeps me focused every day”, says Dr. Hazledine.

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More about Dr. Sam Hazledine

Thirty three year old Sam Hazledine holds himself to the highest standards in all aspects of his life. He persists until he is successful in everything he partakes in; from graduating from Otago Medical School in 2003, to convincingly winning the New Zealand Extreme Ski Championships by skiing the most dangerous lines and dropping a 90 foot cliff thereby qualifying for the World Tour later that year, to starting and growing MedRecruit into a successful profitable business at awesome speed.

Sam does not see obstacles as problems, rather as opportunities to overcome and to grow. In 2002 he sustained a life-threatening head injury which put him in a coma for two days. Doctors said he would probably not function at a high level again and that it was unlikely he would be able to return to medical school and he would certainly never ski again. Sam didn’t buy into this! Within two months he was back at medical school and one year later he won the national freeski title.

After realising his dream of winning the national extreme ski title in the winter of 2003, Sam started work as a junior doctor. He quickly saw that the medical system was not adapting and catering for the changing lifestyle demands of the new generation of doctors entering into medicine, and this was leading to an alarming 25% of medical graduates leaving New Zealand within three years of graduation.

After one-and-a-half years working in the hospital system as a salaried doctor, Sam decided to go locuming. He dealt with the big medical recruitment agencies and found their service lacking. All the agencies paid lip service to lifestyle, but none could actually deliver it to doctors. None of them had an objective way to match doctors to work that suited not only their careers, but also their lifestyles.

Sam saw the opportunity to help doctors achieve a lifestyle in medicine and an idea was born. But, for the idea to succeed, Sam had to approach it in a completely novel way compared to the established, traditional, agencies. To deliver what doctors really wanted Sam had to create a lifestyle-centric agency that had an objective way of matching doctors to jobs that matched their lives and careers.

Sam’s idea was met with disapproval from the medical establishment who wanted junior doctors to continue to ask no questions and do as they were told. The biggest medical recruitment agency in New Zealand actually threatened Sam, warning him of the competitive environment he was getting into and making it clear they would do what they could to ensure he failed.

Despite this, Sam knew what doctors needed and weren’t getting, and he wanted to deliver it to them. He also knew that innovative marketing was needed to get his message to doctors and he was determined to make it a success.

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