KEY POINTS:
Waiting times for patients needing surgery to remedy a major form of heart-artery disease have more than doubled in Auckland.
A leading cardiologist says the delays increase the risk of patients dying.
In the year to March, the average wait for treatment from the Auckland District Health Board for these patients was 64 days, compared with 27 days in 2002/03.
They had a severe narrowing of the left-main artery feeding fresh blood and oxygen to most of the heart.
The Herald obtained the figures from the board under the Official Information Act.
"Waiting an average of 64 days for bypass surgery for left-main disease is unacceptable," Associate Professor John Elliott, of the University of Otago at Christchurch, said yesterday.
Excessive delays before surgery had been shown to increase the risk of patients dying, said Dr Elliott, former regional chairman of the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand.
"It's agreed internationally that coronary artery bypass graft surgery reduces mortality in patients with left-main disease."
In many places overseas, patients had the surgery within 48 hours of being diagnosed, putting Auckland well outside the norm.
"It's fair to say the difficulties Auckland may have in offering more timely surgery are probably experienced by all the other publicly-funded surgical programmes in New Zealand," said Dr Elliott.
The health board's general manager of cardiac services, Kay Hyman, would not comment on the suggestion that Auckland's waiting times were excessive compared with those in Britain and other countries.
"The environment is completely different," she said.
She attributed the sharp increase in waiting times at Auckland Hospital, which takes heart bypass patients from Auckland and Northland, to a shortage of nurses in the intensive care unit and changes in angioplasty, a less-invasive treatment for narrowed heart arteries.
"Access to other cardiology interventions influences the number of people that are referred for surgery."
Ms Hyman also declined to compare her hospital's 0.9 per cent rate of deaths on the waiting list for all heart-artery bypass surgery patients with the rate in other hospitals.
But the relatively stable number of deaths since 2005 could mean the hospital was succeeding in trying to give the sickest patients the highest priority for surgery, she said.
"The death of a patient on the waiting list may or may not have been prevented by earlier access to surgery.
"Some deaths on the waiting list may be totally unrelated to their cardiac condition."
Dr Elliott said the death rates varied widely around the world, and it was hard to compare sites.
