You know the NZ Health system is screwed when we’re planning to send women to Australia for cancer treatment
By any reasonable measure, New Zealand’s health system is broken, and nothing screams that louder than Health New Zealand actively considering sending women with gynaecological cancer to Australia for treatment.
Gynaecological cancers make up one in ten cancer cases among Kiwi women. We’re not talking about some rare condition with low demand. These are critical, life-threatening illnesses - cervical, ovarian, and endometrial cancers - and the system responsible for caring for our mothers, daughters, sisters and wives is on the brink of collapse.
Simply because their aren’t enough specialists left in the country. At one point, Wellington had zero gynaecological oncologists. That’s the capital city of New Zealand, not a remote outpost, left without a single specialist to perform surgeries on women with cancer. The remaining handful of experts are already overworked and based in Christchurch and Auckland. Now, over 100 women from central NZ will be forced to fly to Christchurch for treatment.
A woman with cancer in Whanganui or Hawke’s Bay might now need to catch a plane just to access surgery. If that doesn’t scream third-world healthcare, what does?
Health NZ even went as far as investigating how much it would cost to send women across the Tasman for surgery. That is how stretched the system is. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because the Christchurch team is hanging on by a thread, putting in insane hours and sacrificing their own wellbeing to plug the gap.
The workforce crisis has been years in the making. Of the last eight New Zealand-trained gynae-oncology specialists, seven left for jobs in Australia. Why? Better pay, better conditions, and less stress. Who can blame them? Meanwhile, the pipeline of new specialists is a trickle. Some are likely heading for early retirement.
Health Minister Simeon Brown says no women have been sent to Australia yet, and that there’s a plan in place. But that plan involves flying doctors up and down the country and rationing services, literally prioritising the highest-risk patients because we can’t meet demand.
The failure isn’t just clinical. It’s political. Brown blames Labour’s health restructure for creating the mess, and Labour blames the current Government’s cuts for making it worse.
Meanwhile, New Zealand women are being told to wait, fly across the country, or potentially cross international borders to receive care they should get in their own hospital.
You know the health system is f***ed when we’re seriously weighing up trans-Tasman medical tourism for basic cancer surgery.
