Private hospitals offer to chip in

Private hospitals are bidding to do more state-funded elective surgery in light of publicity over patients being rejected by public hospitals.

Southern Cross says it has spare capacity to do more elective surgery in its hospitals and it is pushing for greater co-operation between the public and private health systems.

Private Surgical Hospitals Association president Tony Hunter said all member hospitals had spare capacity at times.

The association had approached governments over a number of years suggesting greater use of private hospitals for publicly-funded work. In some cases operations were cheaper in the private sector, he said.

Opposition politicians, who have highlighted the numbers of patients removed from public hospital waiting lists, have also pushed for more state-funded operations in private hospitals.

Health Minister Pete Hodgson said last night that district health boards could buy elective operations from private hospitals if they wished.

"There's nothing to stop DHBs doing more surgery in private hospitals. The Government is indifferent to who provides the services.

"But the price would have to be right and the DHB would have to have the resources to do that. From time to time DHBs do that, for overflow reasons."

When asked if he could offer the kind of increased co-operation the private hospitals wanted, he said public hospitals were happy to reach for the private sector's capacity when they needed help, subject to pricing.

"That's not a co-operation answer; that's a market answer."

Southern Cross group chief executive Ian McPherson said that on average 4 per cent of surgery at its hospitals was funded by district health boards and 10 per cent in Auckland.

The Government funded elective surgery for 106,503 patients last year, of whom about 6000 were treated in private hospitals. Southern Cross' health insurance arm funded 108,930 surgical procedures.

Southern Cross estimates that around 180,000 elective surgical operations were funded by private health insurers last year and that a further 40,000 to 50,000 were funded from other sources, including the Accident Compensation Corporation.

When asked if Southern Cross was making a marketing pitch because of publicity over waiting lists, Dr McPherson said his organisation's hospitals were not-for-profit and using spare capacity for publicly-funded work "would have a marginal effect on hospital overheads".

In the past year, health boards have sent thousands of patients, who were not considered sick enough to see a specialist, back to GP care. In the year to January, boards dropped 8108 patients from waiting lists after specialists had assessed them as needing surgery, nearly twice the number dropped in the previous 12 months.