This article was written by Louisa Steyl of the SouthlandTimes for The Press. Published October 12, 2024. To access the original article, click here.
Health NZ’s latest performance data shows 900 southerners waiting longer than 365 days for surgery, up almost 400 in six months.
Te Whatu Ora released its performance report for the quarter ending June 2024 last week, showing the jump in Southland and Otago patients waiting more than a year for surgery had risen from 525 in Q2, at the end of December 2023.
The vast majority of the patients on this list — 326 — were waiting for orthopaedic surgeries, most of which were joint replacements.
“We acknowledge long wait times can be distressing and we are working to reduce these delays where possible,” Southern Health group director of operations Hamish Brown said.
He attributed the increase in surgery wait times to a number of reasons, including bed capacity, staff availability, and high demand for urgent and acute cases.
Health NZ was using outsourcing, additional surgery sessions, alternative care pathways and demand management measures to ease delays, Brown said.
The other Southland and Otago patients on the wait list at the end of June were waiting for ear, nose, and throat surgery (136), plastics surgery (75), urology (71), general surgery (65), gynaecology (64), ophthalmology (36), dental (23), vascular (17), paediatric surgery (9), cardiothoracic (6), neurosurgery (6) and cardiac surgery (1).
Health New Zealand reported just under 30,000 emergency department presentations in Southland and Otago for the fourth quarter of 2023/2024, the second highest number in the South Island behind Canterbury on around 40,000.
It was a steep jump in presentations, from under 20,000 in Q2 2023/2024, but when asked about it, Brown said there appeared to be a gap between local and national data, which Health New Zealand was investigating.
Emergency departments in Southland and Otago, including those managed by contracted providers, saw an average of more than 300 presentations a day between July 2023 and July 2024, Brown said.
He attributed the high number to the southern district’s large and growing population — “particularly in the Queenstown Lakes area which had 8% population growth in 2023, compared to the rest of New Zealand, which had 2.1% population growth”.
A spokesperson for Health New Zealand noted that performance data was a snapshot in time, which meant there could be variances depending on when data was uploaded and extracted.
Health NZ had various levels of data validation, the spokesperson said, and quality assurance processes were being implemented to improve national reporting.
