Letters telling southern people their wait for radiation oncology is longer than it should be are not being sent, as the health board tries to find words that will not distress patients further, a Dunedin oncologist says.
"It’s very hard to find wording that is not alarming, because the situation is alarming," Lyndell Kelly told a Southern District Health Board committee meeting yesterday.
"We don’t know how to word it to minimise alarm and still be realistic."
Dr Kelly, who is also a board member, warned the hospital advisory committee meeting in Invercargill the number of people waiting for care was also not under control.
She said there could be 175 patients on the waiting list by June.
However, specialist services executive director Patrick Ng said her projections were not "robust".
His report to the committee, tabled yesterday, stated it had been "challenging to stay on top of the overall workload".
The service ideally liked to maintain a "forward load" of about 50 "first specialist appointments" but at present it was 100.
"Urgent patients are being seen within clinically indicated timeframes but less urgent cases which would normally be indicated at 4 weeks are being seen at closer to 6-7 weeks. A letter is being constructed which outlines that the wait is longer than is ideal."
Although Mr Ng said waiting times were "less than ideal and people need to be aware of that", he said there would be short-term relief for the growing workload as long-serving staff taking back-to-back sabbaticals returned, the hiring of a fifth radiation oncologist was imminent, and recruiting for a sixth was under way.
To address medium- to long-term issues once the sixth radiation oncologist had been working for a year, the situation would be reviewed.
The department got into trouble in June last year when waiting times ballooned to 8-12 weeks, double the Ministry of Health guidelines for treatment.
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Comments
What is worse, getting a personal letter in the mail, or to find out via a news paper? Be honest with you patients and start providing solutions not bandaids to the problem or hollow excuses for the delay.
After having been recently diagnosed with bowel and liver cancer, following a 6 week wait for a "semi-urgent" colonoscopy I am distressed to read more articles like this. Even though I had signs of and was experiencing issues I was still not high level enough to warrant an urgent colonoscopy. Not entirely sure what more you can do than advise the medical experts what is happening within your body but as a young fit male I simply didn't meet their criteria.
I have been given a 4 week window for treatment plan by medical oncologist, the wait and not knowing what to expect is an absolute drama. Any wait is not ideal and given our national health care system their is no reason there is one. If we were in a user pay's system I could understand it but here we are supposed to be in a free health care set up.