Stress Screening Kiosk Pilot at Auckland Medical Clinic

In February 2025, Botany Junction Medical Centre in Flat Bush quietly launched a six-week pilot programme that placed a touchscreen wellbeing kiosk in its waiting room — one of the first initiatives in New Zealand to formally connect stress and anxiety screening results with targeted responsible gambling information. The project was developed in collaboration with an Auckland-based digital health consultancy, Tūhono Health Solutions, and received partial funding from an online entertainment operator. Patients attending routine appointments were invited to complete a short anonymous questionnaire on the kiosk, and those whose responses flagged elevated stress markers were automatically presented with a curated set of community resources — including, for the first time at a primary care site, links to problem gambling support lines alongside mental health contacts. For more information about the online entertainment operator involved in the funding arrangement, readers can visit https://lolajackcasino-au.com/, where the company outlines its community responsibility commitments in the New Zealand and Australian markets.

The kiosk itself was a 21-inch wall-mounted tablet unit, supplied by Wellington firm MedScreen Technologies and installed near the reception desk on 3 February 2025. Over the six-week trial period, which concluded on 14 March, a total of 412 patients interacted with the device. Of those, 38 percent completed the full ten-question survey, which was adapted from the validated Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10). Among respondents, 61 individuals — approximately 37 percent of completions — recorded scores indicating moderate-to-high psychological distress. Each of those participants was shown a secondary screen containing contact details for the Problem Gambling Foundation of New Zealand, the Mental Health Foundation's 1737 helpline, and a locally produced PDF guide on recognising stress-related decision-making patterns, including impulsive financial behaviour.

Why a Medical Clinic and an Online Casino Partnered on This

The rationale behind the collaboration was explained by Dr Aroha Tane, one of three general practitioners at Botany Junction Medical, during a brief presentation to the South Auckland Primary Health Organisation on 19 March 2025. "We know that financial stress, anxiety, and gambling harm often occur together and often go undetected in a primary care setting," Dr Tane told attendees. "Our waiting room sees around 280 patients per week. That's a significant point of contact that we weren't fully using." Dr Tane noted that the idea of incorporating gambling harm content alongside standard mental health signposting had been discussed internally for over a year, but that a suitable funding mechanism had not been available through the public health system alone.

That mechanism arrived through an approach from Lola Jack Casino, an online casino — or in local terms, an online gambling (онлайн азартные игры) platform — operating under licence in the Australian and New Zealand digital entertainment market. A representative of the company, regional partnerships coordinator James Whitfield, confirmed in an email statement that the casino contributed NZD $14,500 toward the kiosk installation, content development, and a post-trial data analysis report. "As an online casino operating in this region, we take our obligations around responsible gambling seriously," Whitfield wrote. "Funding a screening tool that actively connects at-risk individuals with support services is one concrete way we can contribute to reducing gambling harm rather than simply publishing a disclaimer on our website."

The content displayed on the kiosk was developed independently by Tūhono Health Solutions, with no editorial input from the casino sponsor. Dr Tane was clear on this point: "The funder had no visibility into individual responses and no influence over which resources were recommended. The clinical content was entirely ours." This separation was verified by the South Auckland Primary Health Organisation's ethics advisory group, which reviewed the project terms in January 2025 before the installation proceeded.

Results and What the Data Showed

A summary report produced by Tūhono Health Solutions and released on 28 March 2025 identified several notable findings from the six-week trial. Among patients who received the high-distress resource screen, 14 subsequently mentioned the kiosk during their consultation — either referencing the gambling support information or the mental health contacts. Two patients asked their GP directly about problem gambling services during appointments that week, which clinic staff described as an unusually high number for such a short period.

The report also noted demographic patterns. The kiosk recorded highest engagement rates between 9am and 11am on weekdays, with patients in the 35–54 age bracket accounting for 58 percent of completed surveys. This aligned broadly with the clinic's existing patient base, which skews toward working-age adults and families in the Flat Bush and Ormiston areas. The authors of the report were careful to note that the sample size was too small to draw statistically significant conclusions, and recommended a follow-up trial of at least six months across multiple clinic sites before any wider rollout is considered.

The Botany Junction Medical pilot is now being cited by at least one district health planning group as a model worth examining further. Whether public health funding can be secured to continue the programme without private sector involvement remains an open question. Dr Tane indicated that the clinic would be applying to the Health Research Council of New Zealand for a feasibility study grant in the second quarter of 2025. "We learned a lot from six weeks," she said. "Enough to know this is worth doing properly."