Leading healthcare provider, ProCare, is today questioning reports out of Te Whatu Ora / Health New Zealand which allege that if someone’s condition has changed, they will be told to see their GP or health provider.

Dr Craig King, Chair of ProCare’s Co-Operative Board, says: “The percentage of patients waiting more than four months for their first specialist assessment has increased from 26.1% in May 2022 to 39.6% in February 2024 according to the latest data from Te Whatu Ora*.

“Sending patients back to their GP won’t fix the problem, it will just add to the growing pressure and workload on GPs. And GPs are pretty certain there won’t be any funding to support taking the load of our secondary care colleagues,” he points out.

Since the backlog began to increase during covid, there have been growing calls across the medical community to address the increasing backlog.

“ProCare, alongside other medical professionals, has been calling for planned care to be addressed for years now,” points out Dr King. “But our calls continue to go unheeded.

“Decreasing the time people sit on wait lists reduces the number of people turning up at emergency departments, reduces patients’ anxiety levels, reduces the number of times they turn up to their general practitioner for treatment, and reduces the impact on the patients’ overall wellbeing.

“The way to solve this is to take a solutions-focused approach to planned care in order to best support communities, take the pressure off hospitals and get those who need support or more certainty around their illness the care they need,” he continues.

“One such solution is to empower GPs to access investigations and treatments that already exist in the community to support people earlier in their illness. This then prevents the need for referral to hospitals, and in some cases, the need for elective surgeries. It might also prevent us needing more beds in hospitals or having to build more hospitals,” says Dr King.

"Let’s call it the ‘ambulance at the top of the cliff approach’,” he concludes.

Reference

* https://tewhatuora.shinyapps.io/ESPI_app/