King’s Birthday Honours 2026: Tauranga urologist Dr Mark Fraundorfer’s MNZM recognises his services to health
Tauranga urologist Dr Mark Fraundorfer has been appointed an MNZM in this year’s King’s Birthday Honours. Photo / Megan Wilson
Tauranga urologist Dr Mark Fraundorfer first planned to be a diving doctor in Cairns before turning to urology.
“My life was always going to be around diving, but things changed,” he told the Bay of Plenty Times with a laugh.
Fraundorfer’s pursuit of a surgical career has led to his appointment as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in this year’s King’s Birthday Honours for services to health, particularly men’s health.
The 75-year-old said he thought the email informing him was “more work coming in” from a health authority.
“But no, it was a very pleasant surprise.”
His initial shock morphed into “a calm feeling of satisfaction”.
Fraundorfer is Tauranga Hospital’s head of urology. He works privately at Tauranga’s Grace Hospital and Rotorua’s Southern Cross Hospital.
He is also leading the plans for private surgical facility Asclepius Surgical, being built in Tauranga’s city centre.
Fraundorfer’s citation said he had advanced surgical practice in urology by pioneering minimally invasive techniques.
He and his partner Professor Peter Gilling CNZM invented the holmium laser procedure in Tauranga, which was “now gold standard around the world”, he said.
Fraundorfer said the procedure was for non-cancerous prostate enlargement, which was a common condition.
His team had been doing LDR (low dose rate) brachytherapy in Tauranga since 1999 for prostate cancer patients.
Fraundorfer was also known for pioneering the “nanoknife” prostate cancer procedure in New Zealand in 2016 at Grace Hospital.
In the early 1990s, he co-founded Venturo, a public-private partnership for urology services.
He also helped establish Tauranga’s Kathleen Kilgour Centre for radiation treatment “from scratch”, which opened in 2014.
“That was pretty hectic for years ... but I’m very proud, it’s been a journey well worth taking.”
From diving to surgery
Fraundorfer said his younger self was “far more passionate about diving” than surgery.
During his first year at the University of Otago, a friend suggested they learn how to dive.
Fraundorfer eventually became a PADI dive instructor and did a Diploma of Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine in Australia.
“It was only by sheer chance that I got into surgery, because I wanted to go to Cairns and be a diving doctor and a GP there. But I had to learn how to do obstetrics.
“I went to England to learn obstetrics and realised that there’s another life called surgery. So, I switched from obstetrics to gynaecology ‘cause my wife said, ‘Do you want to get up at 3 in the morning when you’re 60 or 50?’
“And I said, ‘Maybe not’. And so, I did urology instead.”
Fraundorfer still managed to find time for his diving passion and was the medical adviser to the New Zealand Underwater Association (NZUA).
As an NZUA accident investigator, he investigated more than 100 fatalities in the 1980s and early 1990s. Only one was “unavoidable”, he said.
Fraundorfer said people getting into trouble while diving for scallops was the most common cause of death at the time.
“Back in those days, everybody used to go scallop diving and fill their bags up, and then they’d get to the surface and run out of air and drown cause they had their bag clipped on to their body and they couldn’t let it go.”
Diving was now much safer due to well-developed training programmes, he said.
Fraundorfer said his other passion was flying helicopters.
“That’s probably the main reason I keep working, ‘cause I’m trying to keep flying. But you see parts of New Zealand that no one else gets to see,” the keen trout fisher said.
Fraundorfer said medicine and technology had massively evolved since he began his career.
“That’s what keeps it interesting ... I think [what] I fear about walking away is boredom.”
Megan Wilson is a health and general news reporter for the Bay of Plenty Times and the Rotorua Daily Post. She has been a journalist since 2021.