Bypass provision before heart unit, board told

Press, 25 July 1985, Page 5

Bypass provision before heart unit, board told

New Zealanders should be concerned about suggestions of setting up a heart transplant surgery unit in this country when cardiac bypass surgery waiting lists were increasing each year, the Canterbury Hospital Board was told yesterday. A board member, Mr Tom McGuigan, said yesterday that the number of people waiting between one and two years for cardiac bypass surgery in New Zealand increased from 26 at the end of 1983 to more than 70 at the end of last year. “I believe that before anyone in this country starts talking about heart transplant services ... the current situation relating to cardiac surgery should be assessed and reconsidered,” he said. Canterbury patients were

still waiting long periods to get cardiac surgery, and the list was growing each year. Patients could no longer be referred to Auckland and Wellington hospitals for cardiac surgery because of staff shortages and costs. They could go only to Dunedin or to the private cardiac surgery unit at Mater Hospital, Auckland. Mr McGuigan said that the cost of a heart transplant would pay for 10 cardiac bypasses. Suggestions that a heart transplant unit go to the private sector also worried him. “I ask the question, ‘Who is the service being provided for'?” He said that 56 of the 106 patients at the Mater unit in 1983 were not New Zealanders. “If we are going to

provide heart transplant services for non-New Zealanders I think the bulk of the people in this country would be very concerned about it. “We should oppose any immediate plans people may have to set up a heart transplant service,” he said. Dr Jocelyn Hay said that Canterbury cardiac patients were suffering now. People were dying while waiting for surgery and that was a “pretty gloomy prospect,” she said. The idea of setting up a heart transplant unit was “not practical politics,” said the deputy chairman, Mrs June Gardiner. Bypass surgery in most parts of the world was routine, and the maximum waiting list in Australia was three to four weeks, said Professor Don Beaven.