Cancer checks report awaited

Press, 23 February 1989, Page 3

Cancer checks report awaited

By

SARAH SANDS

No improvements will be made to colposcopy services until the Canterbury Hospital Board receives a report from a special focus group.

A board member, Mr David Close, had moved at a meeting yesterday that the board spend $20,000 immediately to reduce the waiting list for colposcopy, a microscopic examination of the cervix. The board held nearly $400,000 in general trust funds and trust funds for cancer treatment and it could afford to spend $lO,OOO on a new colposcope and $lO,OOO on extra colposcopy sessions, he said.

“I realise that almost all the women on the waiting list will not have serious cancer but it’s agonising for them to wait weeks and sometimes months before they get final information about their condition,” he said.

The board has already applied to the Health Department for a special

service development grant of $500,000 to expand its colposcopy service. Last month, the focus group was set up to look at cervical screening and colposcopy services and

report to the March meeting of the board.

Mr Close told yesterday’s meeting that the application for the service development grant was unlikely to be approved immediately and certainly not in this financial year. “I am not proposing some hair-brained scheme

— I have brought this matter to the board because it is a matter of some urgency. “The waiting list is growing every month. There is a lot of concern in the community about this and we should not delay from month to

month if it is within our power to take action,” said Mr Close.

The chairman of the health services committee, Mrs June Gardiner, said the board should do nothing until it received the report of the focus group.

“This motion pre-empts the work of the focus

group which has been set up with specialist assistance to consider in detail what is required.” Spending $20,000 now could jeopardise the service development grant if the Health Department perceived the board was

moving in different directions, said Mrs Gardiner. A board member, Mrs Honor Bonisch, said it would be inappropriate to tackle the issue in a piece-meal way. “While we are all most concerned that this waiting list be eliminated, this

is just one of those things we can’t do immediately,” she said.