The Southern District Health Board is working to understand how cancer services will be impacted when 10 medical physicists walk off the job on Monday.
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Southland and Otago cancer patients are still travelling to Christchurch for treatment under alert level 4. The Southern District Health Board is looking for ways to make up lost time when restrictions ease.
In October, then crown monitor Dr Andrew Connolly was appointed to chair an Endoscopy User Group to implement recommendations to improve the board s colonoscopy services. In the same meeting, he told the board: “Category C shouldn’t exist. I’m not simply going to referee a group of people arguing about whether a patient is category A, B, or C.” On Monday, Connolly, who is now the chief medical officer for the Ministry of Health and a clinical advisor to the Southern DHB, said removing the category was simply a matter of bureaucracy. There had been a blanket ban on putting patients with symptoms on the category C waiting list since October, he said, but some patients had ended up on the list after a “scrap” over waiting list definitions, he said.
Mercy Hospital chief executive Richard Whitney says private healthcare providers in Otago and Southland do not have radiation treatment machines to help a backlog of patients waiting to start cancer treatment.