Patients miss the hospital bus

North Shore Hospital is awfully hard to get to for some of its Waitakere outpatients, and they want that situation improved. Kylie Munro reports
West Auckland patients are begging Waitemata District Health Board to revamp the Waitakere to North Shore hospital shuttle. Patients say the bus, which makes a daily return trip from Rodney district to Waitakere and North Shore Hospitals, does not run often enough or match appointment times. Waitakere patients with morning appointments can't use the shuttle ? they don't get to North Shore Hospital until after midday. Breast cancer patient Bev took public transport to her post-mastectomy check-ups and mammograms at North Shore Hospital. Each trip involved 15 minutes walking and 75 minutes, each way, on a bus. ''The time frames were not suitable,'' she says. ''It could be quite a challenge, especially if I was nauseous, tired or breathless. If you can get a shuttle it takes away the exhaustion of it.'' Waitakere Health Link co-ordinator Michelle Mann says the elderly and people without a car, money for petrol or family to drive them can't get to the hospital. She says the shuttle should have an early morning run, afternoon service and, possibly, a Greenlane trip. Ms Mann says before April last year the shuttle did not service Rodney, the route and timetable was set according to patient need, and patients were picked up at their homes. She says ''overnight'' the health board decided Rodney needed the shuttle and the Waitakere service was reduced. ''Waitakere Hospital opened, as we know it, in February 2005 and the health board decided Waitakere patients no longer needed to get to North Shore Hospital,'' says Ms Mann. ''But that's not the case at all, with most of the outpatient clinics still at North Shore and a lot of surgery still happening at North Shore.'' Health board statistics show an average of 28 Waitakere residents still used the shuttle each month between July last year and August this year. ''There's a plan for Waitakere to have all the services a general hospital has but it's not there yet,'' says Ms Mann. Last month, Rodney Age Concern and Rodney Health Link sought $78,816 from the health board to run its own shuttle from Rodney to North Shore and Greenlane. ''We support the Rodney proposal as it would serve Rodney better and free up the shuttle to do more in Waitakere,'' says Ms Mann. Health board chief executive Dwayne Crombie says a decision on the Rodney proposal won't be made until December or January. It will be put through a prioritisation process with other bids for transport and new health resources funding. Mr Crombie says the agreement was always to transfer the shuttle to Rodney residents when Waitakere Hospital's acute medical and emergency care departments opened. He accepts the timetable of the shuttle is not ideal and is ''reasonably sure'' some changes will be made. But he questions how much the health board should have to pay for transport. The existing shuttle costs $85,000 a year and a further $600,000 to $700,000 is spent on subsidising patients under the National Travel Assistance Policy. ''Every dollar I spend on shuttles and buses is a dollar I can't spend on providing medical services,'' he says. ''Yes, people struggle to get to health services, but there's only one pot of money and we can only make it go so far.