Health NZ Capital and Coast group director of operations Jamie Duncan said the scheme was about improving overall access to MRI scans.
Photo: Flickr / Florida International University
Health NZ says an initiative to give patients in the Greater Wellington region petrol vouchers to drive to Whanganui for an MRI scan is working to bring waiting lists down.
Hundreds of patients in the region had been offered $150 petrol payments to travel out of the district to get the diagnostic procedure faster.
There had been criticism of the scheme – with the senior doctors union claiming it offered people the chance to buy their way up the public wait lists for MRI scans.
But Health NZ Capital and Coast group director of operations Jamie Duncan told Checkpoint that was not the case.
“We’re providing support for people that have the ways and means to access the scans in Whanganui. I think the impact here is twofold. Clearly those people get access to a scan, but what it does do is it frees up capacity locally on our MRI scanners for those people who aren’t in a position to travel,” he said.
Duncan said 288 patients had taken the opportunity to travel to Whanganui with a petrol voucher.
“What that means locally is from September our waiting time for a scan was approximately six months in Wellington, now just over six months later the wait time is closer to three to four months,” he said.
“It’s having a significant impact in improving access locally.”
The target wait time was six weeks for an MRI scan.
“We still know we have a ways and means to go to hit that target but you can see on that trajectory we’re moving there quite quickly,” Duncan said.
Duncan said the scheme was about improving overall access to MRI scans.
“There are other things we’re doing locally to improve access, we’re outsourcing to private providers, we’re employing more radiology staff in the public system to increase access to public MRI, we’re working weekend shifts to improve access as well,” he said.
Duncan said there were seven public MRI machines in the central region, with Whanganui being one of those.
There were two in Wellington Hospital and one in Hutt Valley Hospital.
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