KEY POINTS:
The Auckland District Health Board accepts it failed to do enough to maintain an adequate number of nurses in a key part of its heart surgery service.
Nursing shortages in its cardiothoracic and vascular intensive care unit are acknowledged as a main cause of the board not being able to perform enough heart artery bypass surgery at Auckland City Hospital, since cardiac services shifted there from Green Lane Hospital in 2003.
The health board's adult rate of state-funded heart artery bypass and valve surgery dropped from 70 per 100,000 population in 2002-03, to 55 in the following year, and has remained at about that level since.
The national average is now at a similar level, declining from 63 per 100,000 in 2002-03. It is estimated that privately-funded surgery currently lifts the rate by 25 per cent.
The Ministry of Health wants the five hospitals which provide cardiac surgery to aim for 74 per 100,000, similar to the rate achieved by the Otago health board.
Auckland DHB chief executive Garry Smith told a board committee meeting yesterday that other boards in the Auckland-Northland region and his own board's funding arm wanted to purchase higher volumes of cardiac treatment.
"I guess the error in our ways here, or the learning, is that we need to overstaff."
His comments followed a staff explanation to the board on the variety of current or recent schemes to try to hire, keep and "grow-our-own" nurses.
These included paying a retention bonus, vocational training programmes, and encouraging nurses to transfer between cardiac services and its general ICU.
