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In October, then crown monitor Dr Andrew Connolly was appointed to chair an Endoscopy User Group to implement recommendations to improve the board s colonoscopy services. In the same meeting, he told the board: “Category C shouldn’t exist. I’m not simply going to referee a group of people arguing about whether a patient is category A, B, or C.” On Monday, Connolly, who is now the chief medical officer for the Ministry of Health and a clinical advisor to the Southern DHB, said removing the category was simply a matter of bureaucracy. There had been a blanket ban on putting patients with symptoms on the category C waiting list since October, he said, but some patients had ended up on the list after a “scrap” over waiting list definitions, he said.
However, he is concerned about wait times for surveillance screening for patients who had possible indications of bowel cancer and needed to be checked regularly. While not a dramatic increase there had been an increase in waiting times for people who in the past had indication of possible bowel cancer but who are had shown up negative but who needed to be kept under surveillance. “. and delays in getting that testing done has been at a level that’s not acceptable. There is work under way to improve that. But in terms of the other measures for those services, the Southern DHB is more or less meeting the target times and the target volumes expected for that population,” Little said.
JOHN KIRK-ANDERSON/STUFF
Canterbury health workers have celebrated the launch of the region s free bowel screening programme - part of a national effort to reduce bowel cancer deaths.
Some southern doctors have welcomed extra funding for the bowel cancer screening, but say it needs to come with extra funding to deliver the services that go along with it. The Government has announced that $13 million will be set aside in the 2021 Budget to complete the rollout of the National Bowel Screening Programme to the remaining six district health boards. The doctors supported more screening but warned that the programme wasn’t fully developed yet and that it shouldn t be offered at the expense of patients who were struggling to get onto colonoscopy waiting lists.