Health service cuts: 'New Zealanders are waiting too long'

• The country is short of healthcare workers across the board
• Wait times for elective surgery - operations scheduled in advance as they're not a medical emergency - have ballooned in recent months
• It's also set targets to shorten wait times in EDs and for elective treatments.
• Commissioner Lester Levy says cuts won't affect frontline staff, but medical professionals are saying otherwise

Patients are facing months of wait-time for elective surgeries, while others are choosing the private route and spending thousands for timely treatment.

The health system is under pressure, with workers raising the alarm about staff shortages and burnout, and patients spending months in pain waiting for a diagnosis or an operation.

While the coalition government has set targets to shorten wait times, it has also cut funding to the sector.

Have you been affected by health worker shortages or budget cuts? Share your story with kate.green@rnz.co.nz

One Greymouth man mortgaged his house to pay for surgery through the private system, after being he would be waiting more than a year on the public list.

Shannon - who preferred not to have his last name used - tore a groin muscle a year ago.

After three specialist appointments, months apart, for cortisone injections that did not work, his surgeon told him: "'Look, if you go onto the public waiting system, I don't know how long it will be, but you'll eventually get done.' I said, 'Well, what do I do until then?' and he said, 'We just have to wait and carry on'."

But with the pain so bad it was hard to walk - and two teenage sons keen to get back to hunting, fishing and tramping with their dad - a year was too long to wait.

He decided to bypass the public system and get it done privately, at a cost of $27,500.

Only days before his surgery, his mother became another victim of the system's delays.

After a fall in the driveway, she was taken to Greymouth Hospital and then transferred to Christchurch, where she waited four days for her leg to be operated on, and then to Dunedin Hospital, where she waited another four.

Each day she prepared for surgery, ate nothing, before being told in the afternoon it wouldn't be done that after all.

Shannon and his mother were now both recovering - and for Shannon, the operation was "expensive, but it's worked".

'It's really worrying'

In Hawke's Bay, Annie Evans' husband is still waiting for cataract surgery after a diagnosis in October.

"It's really worrying," she said. "We've got active lives - we're in our seventies, but we're not sitting around knitting and watching television all day, we're active people doing active things - and I think it's only a matter of time until he has an accident because of this complete lack of vision in the left eye."

He was not able to drive at night, and soon he wouldn't be able to drive at all.

Evans said he had been scheduled for surgery twice, first in July and then most recently last week - but both operations were cancelled last-minute to accommodate other urgent eye cases.

"This isn't life threatening," Evans said. "He's not gonna die from this. But his quality of life is so compromised."

She said she could not believe the health agency was cutting funding while it was under such pressure.

'A big challenge'

Professor Lester Levy, the commissioner who replaced the board of Health New Zealand, said when he got the job one of his priorities was reducing wait times - but three weeks in, the agency's financials were worse than he had thought.

"New Zealanders are waiting too long," he told Nine to Noon on Tuesday. "In my view, the safest wait is the shortest wait, and we've got a big challenge to get those waiting times down."

Te Whatu Ora said in a statement it was working to improve wait times, and had performed 10 percent more elective surgeries in the year ending May 2024, compared to the year before.

But its quarterly performance report, released in July, showed nearly 77,755 patients (40.2 percent) waited longer than four months for a first specialist appointment, compared with 68,179 (36.5 percent) in the previous quarter.

But hospital and specialist services delivery unit director Jo Gibbs said demand was growing due to an ageing population, with more complex medical problems and an increase in the treatments available due to new technology.

Gibbs confirmed the second phase of a project to improve communication about surgery wait times to patients and GPs was underway.

She said in the first phase earlier this year, letters were sent to the more than 25,000 patients who waited longer than 120 days for a first specialist assessment across four specialties: general surgery, ophthalmology, gynaecology, and orthopaedics.

They were now expanding it to other specialties.