The Southern District Health Board is considering whether to repeat this year's push to increase the amount of elective surgery it does.
In January, when operating theatres are generally less used, the SDHB ran an expanded surgical programme to perform more revenue-gaining elective surgery and address waiting lists.
Unexpectedly, the extra surgeries saw extra cancer cases being diagnosed, which led to the radiation oncology waiting list increasing by more than 100 patients - a situation which an SDHB commissioners' meeting this week was told staff were now prepared for if the exercise was carried out again.
Elective surgery is a revenue earner for the SDHB, which scheduled the extra procedures in January as a way of addressing its $20 million-plus deficit.
The organisation had feared the series of stopworks by resident doctors could wipe out those gains, but specialist services executive director Patrick Ng said by the end of the financial year the SDHB was about 140 case weights over target.
"This is a notable achievement when you consider that over a week of elective activity was lost during the year, comprising of about 300-400 case weights, due to strike activity."
With January's experience the SDHB now had a sustainable model where it could improve nursing numbers in the intensive care unit, improve booking practices and utilise an outsourcing budget to once more increase elective surgery numbers if the board opted to do so, Mr Ng said.
"We are currently in the process of running the same processes to ensure that by the time we get to December we will have a clear pathway towards the maximisation of theatre lists in January.
"Options for increasing acute operating capacity, while allowing us to remain within our overall budget, are currently being explored and will be worked up into an overall proposal in the near future."
Elective surgery since January had targeted services with lengthy wait lists which had been placed in "recovery programmes", Mr Ng said.
Urology and general surgery had seen major drops in the number of patients waiting longer than they should to be seen, and this week breaches of ear, nose and throat waiting times had reduced to zero, he said.
Orthopaedic surgery remained a problem with about 200 breaches in both Dunedin and Southland, but a new Ministry of Health prioritisation tool was helping to address that.
"The recovery programme continues to be a difficult programme and unfortunately, following on from the RDA strikes a number of the medicine, women and children services now have breaches which are masking some of the progress made in surgery," Mr Ng said.
"We now need to consider a broader elective surgery recovery programme that expands to include some of these medicine, women and children services."
