The national travel assistance scheme - which helps hundreds of Southerners with their travel costs to receive specialist hospital care - has "significant room for improvement", the Ministry of Health says.
The scheme, set up in 2005, is used by about 33,000 people nationally each year.
People living in the Southern District Health Board region are big users of the scheme due to Southern being the biggest DHB and having a large regional population.
There have long been concerns the NTA scheme is not achieving its aim of improving equity of access to health services.
The process for claiming funding has been criticised for being overly bureaucratic. Others said deserving people on the margin of eligibility for funding often missed out.
"Some existing views were that the process of registering for and claiming travel assistance was onerous, that some people were not getting the support they needed despite difficult circumstances, and that the scheme was administered inconsistently between regions," a Ministry of Health report said.
"A number of stakeholders had genuine concerns that some people simply do not access treatment unless they have financial assistance for travel and accommodation."
Examples cited in the report of issues with the scheme included:
- A cancer patient who needed treatment in three centres in the southern region was told she needed to fill out a new form for each treatment - and that it would take at least six weeks for the paperwork to be registered.
- A cancer patient who travelled five times to Dunedin for treatment in six months and racked up 2040km in travel, but did not qualify for NTA scheme help as the criteria was least six appointments on separate days in any six-month period.
The Southern DHB has welcomed the report.
Strategy, primary and community executive director Lisa Gestro said its clinicians were always mindful of the impact travel could have on patients.
"The review recognises this and proposes several recommendations that will help address equity of access for all health service users," she said.
"We look forward to the next steps in progressing this work, particularly where it will help reduce or remove barriers for our rural and remote populations."
The ministry said the NTA scheme needed to be more patient-focused, provide practical solutions for its clients, be modernised and streamlined, be flexible enough to allow discretion for local circumstances, and be more consistent between regions.
Recommendations included a review of the scheme, that DHBs and the ministry work together to design new registration and payment procedures, that eligibility criteria to be reconsidered, and that consideration be given to increasing funding.
