The Southern District Health Board this week released details of those cases, saying it was making an effort to clear the backlog, assuming delays caused by Covid-19 did not intervene.
Specialist services executive director Patrick Ng told an SDHB hospital advisory committee meeting Covid lockdowns were largely responsible for the long waiting times.
Other factors included availability of staff and the complexity of the cases.
‘‘We do have a relatively high number of patients who have waited over a year, so we put a particular focus on this, including a weekly meeting to identify actions we can take.’’
Those weekly meetings involved a review of each case, in an attempt to give the affected person some certainty that they would indeed be seen, Mr Ng said.
‘‘We can, for example, plug long-waiting patients them into available gaps on to surgical lists, and having identified individual patients we can place them on outsourcing lists where there is capacity to do that.’’
Some patients had also given up on waiting and received treatment privately, which had also reduced the number waiting for a public procedure, Mr Ng said.
Staff had been monitoring long waits for six weeks and already moved 116 of 375 patients who had been waiting for surgery.
‘‘However, due to the accumulation of patients on our waiting lists, we are seeing patients tip into the 365-day threshold,’’ Mr Ng said.
The SDHB was also considering whether the soon to open Queenstown Southern Cross Hospital might be able to treat some of the board’s most patient patients.
