Shane Reti: 250,000 hospital procedures cancelled due to Covid - including 7,150 in Northland

CT scans are among the 136,889 cancelled health procedures since Covid-19 first hit NZ, says National's Health Spokesman Dr Shane Reti.

OPINION:

250,000 hospital procedures have been cancelled since March 2020.

In recent weeks, we have heard about surgical waiting lists doubling from 14,000 to 28,000 in just a 10 month period.

We have also heard that 36,000 people are waiting more than 4 months to see a specialist, and recently we heard about a menu of proposals to address this.

These have been the headline numbers, but there is more to this, including figures for cancelled radiology, X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, and variations across DHBs.

The numbers for delayed, cancelled or transferred hospital procedures (inpatient and outpatient) can be split into the Alpha period, from when Alpha Covid arrived in March 2020 until August 2021, then the Delta period, from August 2021 to the end of the DHBs a few months ago in June 2022. Across these two periods, we see 136,889 cancelled procedures in the Alpha period and 116,044 in the Delta period, for a rounded total of 250,000 since Covid arrived.

In the most recent and relevant Delta period, the 116,044 cancelled procedures are heavily weighted with cancelled First Specialist Appointments and follow-ups (62,524), cancelled surgery (15,919) and cancelled radiology (9,086).

There are several things we learn and can question from this information.

The largest cancellations are in Counties Manukau and Auckland DHB. What is unclear, is why midsize DHBs such as Capital and Coast (7,825) and Northland (7,150) seem to have numbers closer to bigger DHBs, such as Waikato (7,230). This is likely to be multifactorial, and include Covid rates and health workforce shortages.

The data confirms that First Specialist Appointments and follow-ups are the largest category, which explains the Minister's proposals recently to manage down follow-ups. Great care will need to be taken in order to not cancel important follow ups.

What is new is the revelation of thousands of radiology appointments (9,086) being cancelled. This may not be surprising, given the important interactions between radiology, specialist appointments and the surgical suite.

The data primarily covers the Covid period from March 2020, which has clearly had a significant impact. I would contend that there were some things that might have mitigated these numbers. Maybe if Andrew Little had built more ICU beds, we wouldn't have had to cancel so many procedures.

Maybe if he had listened to the warning signal from 20 DHBs a year ago, fewer procedures would have been cancelled. Maybe if his attention and money had not been spent on the health reforms, more would have been done.

That's a sequence of maybes, and involves some rear-vision, but regardless, what we have today is a huge backlog of procedures that urgently needs a convincing plan - that at this point, is still wanting.