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Auckland District Health Board chairman Wayne Brown's claim that the board achieved waiting-list compliance last year without sending patients back to their GP has been dismissed as "rubbish".
Mr Brown had written to the Herald in response to correspondence about the awarding of the region's medical laboratory testing contract to new provider Labtests.
"A more interesting health story is how come Auckland District Health Board, the biggest, most complex district health board, was the only one to achieve waiting-list compliance without sending back a single patient to their general practitioner," he wrote.
Glen Innes GP David de Lacey said Mr Brown's comments were "rubbish". Dr de Lacey said up until about three months ago, he was getting one patient a month referred back.
The return rate was particularly acute during the waiting-list cull last September, when health boards were instructed by the Ministry of Health to make sure patients waited no longer than six months for elective surgery.
"You can imagine the huge amount of work for us and the delay in getting them properly treated."
Dr de Lacey said most were waits for first specialist assessments, while some were for elective surgery, particularly hip replacements. All were Auckland City patients, he said.
Mr Brown, who is in the United States, is standing by his comments.
"A lot of the other DHBs sent hundreds of people back. We dealt with everybody."
When asked about the figures revealed by a parliamentary question from National health spokesman Tony Ryall which indicated otherwise, Mr Brown said, "[Many] on our waiting list don't come from our district ... They are funded by Waitemata, Counties-Manukau or Northland, or somewhere else. But the people from our district all got dealt with.
"Each district health board is responsible for its own people under population-based funding ... Some of those health boards have not bought enough health treatment from us ...
"So you can be discharged back to your GP from Auckland District Health Board but you weren't part of [our waiting list].
"We were getting bad publicity for people we weren't funded for."
The board had said last September that no patients were being sent back to their GPs. Instead 954 people were being shifted from its surgical waiting list to an "active review" list.
It also sent 770 ophthalmology patients back to the Waitemata health board at that board's request.
