Wait-lists plan 'hides failings'

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

A plan to divert several hundred hospital patients back to their general practitioners is another ploy to hide the health system's failings, the National Party says.

The Auckland District Health Board scheme was similar to the dumping of thousands of patients from surgical waiting lists around the country, the party's health spokeswoman, Lynda Scott, said yesterday.

GPs had referred the Auckland patients, who had ear, nose or throat conditions, to hospital specialists because they thought they had major problems that were beyond their capabilities to treat.

The patients had already endured delays and now faced more costs for GP care and the risk that even more serious health problems could be missed, said Dr Scott.

But the board's clinical director of primary care, Dr Allan Pelkowitz, said the plan, which applied only to adults, was quite different from simply removing patients from waiting lists, because specialists were giving specific treatment advice to the GPs.

Most of the patients were suffering from recurrent sinusitis - inflammation of the sinuses - and specialists would recommend that their GPs put them on a six to eight-week course of antibiotics and possibly a repeat.

This was much longer than the usual two-week course of antibiotics that GPs prescribed.

It was a condition and form of treatment that was beyond most GPs' usual experience but was within their capabilities.


Dr Pelkowitz expected that a few of the patients would not respond to antibiotics and would need hospital care.

But they would be able to receive this more quickly than before because the waiting list had been cleared of people not needing surgery.

Bruce Arroll, an associate professor of general practice at Auckland University, said the plan was a reasonable way of trying to clear an overloaded waiting list.

But he said he had searched and found no clinical trials showing whether long courses of antibiotics were helpful for recurrent sinusitis.

Some GPs would already have tried this treatment.