New Zealand First has been asking questions about elective surgery – surgery that is not an emergency but that often changes people’s lives.
It’s hip operations, cataracts, hernia and many more. A hip operation, for example, often completely changes a person’s lifestyle. They are pain free and can walk without limping.
There have always been waiting lists for such surgery. But every government makes changes and the National government has done that. But we have discovered that they system now being used is disguising the number of untreated patients.
In figures supplied from the Minister of Health’s office we found that in too many cases people going to hospital for an operation are tossed out untreated.
The government says it is targeting these operations yet many are missing out.
The ratio of untreated elective surgeries has got worse since 2000.
For example, in the Auckland area nearly 8000 people left the hospital waiting list untreated in 2014. In the Bay of Plenty area a New Zealander is now nearly twice as likely to be turned away from surgery as under the previous government
The government must come clean on this instead of just trumpeting a campaign around elective surgery. So many people are being let down, after initially having gone through the GP visits and all the rigmarole to get on the waiting list.
Let’s face it, there is still a huge demand for elective surgery, so as well as people going untreated who were on the waiting list, we have thousands who never make it to the list. The Ministry of Health does not have figures on how many.