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One hundred surgeries to be performed at Waikato Hospital in June have been postponed.
Operations are being postponed as hospitals struggle with staff shortages and high demand — and there’s no end in sight, a health leader says.
One of the worst was Waikato Hospital, where 100 surgeries – due in June – were postponed and 318 procedures were outsourced.
This was despite fewer surgeries scheduled to begin — at 279 fewer than the number done in June last year.
And it would be impossible to catch up, said the president of the New Zealand Association of General Surgeons, Dr. Rowan French.
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Tom Lee / Stuff
Waikato Hospital postponed 100 surgeries scheduled for June, interim district director Chris Lowry said.
“We don’t have the opportunity to overtake [this time],” he said.
“The acute need for services will come in a few months, but the underlying [staff] shortages will still be there.”
Normally, staff could schedule out-of-hours or Saturday surgeries to catch up, but there were no nurses or technicians to make that happen.
“Most people have fallen between 20 and 45%, depending on the hospital and specialty.”
There were some pockets in the country that did well, but Waikato was at the bottom of that list, he said.
“It’s pretty bleak now.”
Obviously, urgent and acute care had to be prioritized, with cancer and heart surgery next on the list, he said.
“They are prioritized and for the most part are not far behind. But in saying that, there have been some cancellations.”
He said long cancer surgeries, lasting longer than eight hours, were sometimes canceled due to the lack of theater nurses.
The problems with the system were no longer about money or financing, he said.
It was a human resource problem.
French said the staff were burned out and left the industry or jumped into the ditch to make more money in Australia.
“We are losing staff quickly.”
“People see other people leaving and that just puts more pressure on the others. It’s a domino effect.”
He said there was a particular shortage of nurses and anesthesia technicians, who were critical to ongoing operations.
There were 721 proceedings in June this year, compared to the pre-Covid-19 number of 1007 in 2019, a Te Whatu Ora Waikato spokesperson said.
“The 721 elective procedures were a combination of cancer and time-critical cases requiring inpatient admission, and we continued with some day procedures such as ophthalmology (eye conditions).”
Waikato Hospital evaluated resources on a daily basis, but because of continued high demand for acute and urgent care, it did not schedule large numbers of elective procedures, said Chris Lowry, interim district director for Te Whatu Ora Waikato.
Some operations were outsourced to the private sector and there was a “recovery plan” to make up for delayed procedures.
A briefing for Waikato Hospital staff said the operational level had been raised to “red status” due to the significant impact of illness.
“We are well aware of the impact that delaying planned care and delaying non-emergency functions has on our patients, but this allows us to free up capacity to help meet the demand for urgent and redeploy emergency services and staff to where they are most needed,” the email reads.
“These actions are only intended as temporary measures to enable us to get through this challenging period.”