With many health targets to meet and a stretched
healthcare workforce across hospitals and primary care,
it’s time to start thinking collectively on how all facets
of our health system can work together to address the
backlog of surgical waitlists.
Te Whatu Ora has issued
a directive that by the end of 2023, no patients will wait
longer than 12 months for treatment, from the date the
decision to treat is made. To reduce the backlog, hospitals
are scheduling surgical procedures on the
weekends.
According to Te Whatu Ora’s Elective
Services Patient Flow Indicators Web Tool*, May 2023 was the
first time since December 2022 where the number of patients
who were given a commitment to treatment but not seen within
the four-month timeframe fell below 40%.
Bindi
Norwell, ProCare Group CEO says: “We need to take a
solutions-focused approach to planned care in order to take
the pressure off hospitals and get the community the care
they need.”
“For our health system to thrive we
can’t work in silos. It requires all of us to work
together and take a proactive approach to keeping our
community as fit and healthy as we can, to avoid the need
for invasive measures such as surgery. Of course, there will
be times when this is needed, and in these cases, we need to
support patients to navigate the various services as and
when they need them seamlessly,” concludes
Norwell.
Dr Craig King, Chair of ProCare Network Board
says: “While we acknowledge the waitlist targets is a step
in the right direction, 12-month wait times are still
unacceptable. It is our belief that primary care could be
better funded and equipped to help get a better
result.
“Empowering general practice teams to access
investigations and treatments that already exist in the
community would allow them to assess their patients against
the agreed and evidence based clinical pathways –
something we have already proposed as part of our primary
care feedback to the previous Minister’s Planned Care
Taskforce,” continues Dr King.
Undertaking such an
assessment would mean general practitioners can provide the
analysis of unmet needs, as well as intervening early to
give certainty and in some cases alleviate the suffering and
stress associated with waiting for planned care services.
This could help prevent the need for referral to hospitals,
and in some cases, the need for elective
surgeries.
Utilising primary care to ease the workload
of other healthcare providers is not new. Recently ProCare
piloted a GP MRI programme, training and enabling GPs to
successfully and safely order MRIs for their patients.
Through this pilot, there has been a reduction by more than
50% in wait times.
ProCare is also acutely aware that
the current backlog of people waiting for hospital-based
planned care services are creating flow on impacts for all
patients wanting to access primary care, as general
practices are having to work harder to support patients in
pain.
A key determinant of the success in enabling
primary care to address the backlog of surgical waitlists,
is having the funding required to train, hire and support
the workforce required to deliver these extra
services.
Enabling this would be a win for patients, a
relief for general practices and hospitals, and it would be
a positive, solutions-based move to improve the performance
and sustainability of hospital
services.
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