Funding will hit cardiac surgery

Press, 24 September 1988, Page 1

Funding will hit cardiac surgery

By

SARAH SANDS

in Auckland Limited health funds meant that tough decisions would soon have to be made on who was given cardiac surgery, said the head of the cardiology department at Green Lane Hospital, Dr John Neutze, yesterday. Cardiac services in New Zealand were “stretched to the absolute limits,” he told a seminar on heart disease. "Our capacity to cut down and push more through for the same price is virtually reached,” said Dr Neutze. “For practical purposes, if someone is elderly and disabled it is becoming almost impossible to treat them for this sort of thing (coronary artery disease) in the public service.” The public needed to know of the situation and push for a positive policy statement, he said. About 250 cardiac operations a million people were done in New Zealand each year, compared with about 750 per million in the United States and South Australia, said Dr Neutze. “Last year the Government put an extra $2 million for the year into this area and our waiting list for the first time for the last 10 years went down — it had been up to nearly 500 and it went down by 100.” The new cardiac unit in Hamilton, which should be working later this year, would help reduce the waiting list, he said. The proposed unit in Christchurch could help the waiting list in the South Island, but was more likely to be a redistribution of resources, he said. “The Dunedin unit has struggled because it is underfunded. Economically it would have been cheaper to have just increased the capacity of the Dunedin unit. “The reason for the Christchurch unit is really social — it is quite a long way from Christchurch to Dunedin,” said Dr Neutze.