New rules dash surgery hopes for 7200 patients

Canterbury's District Health Board will dump 7200 people needing surgery from its waiting lists this month.

They will be sent letters and referred back to their GPs for monitoring.

The letters will tell the patients - previously deemed to be in need of surgery - that they are not sick enough to qualify for public hospital surgery.

They need operations such as heart bypass surgery, hip replacements and surgery for varicose veins, hernias and gall bladders.

GPs say they may adopt a policy of continually lobbying for every rejected patient to be returned to the hospital waiting list.

The national doctors' indemnity insurer, Medical Protection Society, said it would advise GPs among its 10,000 members to write letters demanding specialist care for any patients they deemed to be in need of surgery.

The society's medico-legal adviser, Aine McCoy, agreed this could include all the 7200 patients dumped from Canterbury's waiting lists.

"It may well be. If they send the patient back ... we just keep knocking on the door," Dr McCoy said.

The health board's executive director of nursing, Mary Gordon, yesterday told the Hospital Advisory Committee that 5943 people had been taken off the first assessment waiting list and 1257 from the surgical in-patient waiting list.

More people would be rejected as patient assessments continued.

The Canterbury health board, with an $850 million budget, was the last health board in the country to introduce the rationing system, which gives patients a score based on the nature of their health problem and the effect it has on their lives.

The most severe cases get surgery while those who are ill but do not reach the threshold - and will never get an operation unless their conditions worsen - are told so and referred back to their GPs.

GPs and consultants are to be sent a list of affected patients, and letters will be sent to patients once their GPs have been notified.

Board chairman Syd Bradley said there had been 24,391 people on the waiting list, and there were now 17,191.

- NZPA

The story so far

Canterbury's health board has moved from waiting lists to a booking system, which means some patients will not qualify for operations unless they become sicker.

The new system will remove 7200 people from the old waiting lists.

Other health boards adopted the new system - amid huge controversy - several years ago.