A cancer patient has slammed the public health care system saying it doesn't have the capabilities to cope with the number of people being diagnosed with cancer.
COVID-19 has continued to dominate the country's health focus, which has seen delays to hundreds of vital appointments putting lives at risk.
One of those to have a vital appointment delayed is cancer patient Ewen Ritchie.
He was told he would have to wait five months to get a biopsy on a lump on his prostate.
"It's very stressful knowing you have cancer growing inside of you but physically, I feel fine," Ritchie told AM.
Ritchie was forced to wait almost ten months to find out he had prostate cancer. He had to wait three months from having his first doctor's appointment to his first MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan. Then he had to wait a further seven weeks for the result of that MRI, before being told he had to wait five months for a biopsy, which totals almost 10 months to see if he has cancer.
So he decided to take out a reverse mortgage and get private care saying "in the end, it's sort of like a no brainer, it's something you have to do, to sort this bugger out".
"It's always on your mind that there are things there or maybe there and you kind of take it on and live your life," he told AM.
"They tell you the early prevention of cancer or early detection of cancer is vital, I just felt waiting six months from the MRI through to having the biopsy was just taking too much of a risk."
"Living Nightmare"
Ritchie slammed the wait time he experienced to figure out he had cancer saying it affected his mental health and the people closest to him.
"It has to me to an extent but the worst affected is my wife who lost her first husband and two of her brothers, one only a year ago, all to prostate cancer, so for her, it's like a living nightmare."
"Doesn't have the capabilities"
Ritchie doesn't believe COVID-19 is to blame for the delays he experienced with his wait time but feels the health care system doesn't have the capabilities to cope.
"My previous interaction with the health care system is they actually looked after me pretty well but on this instance, it's clear the system either doesn't cope with the volume or it certainly doesn't have the capabilities compared to what you get when you go private," Ritchie told AM.
Dr Kate Gregory the medical director at the Cancer Society agreed with Ritchie saying the problems in the system already existed before COVID.
"I think it's had some impact but I don't think we can blame all of this on COVID, I think a lot of these problems were long-standing and were there in the making anyway," she told AM.
"I think COVID would've had some impact and made things worse but I don't think we can blame COVID for everything."
The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners medical director, Dr Bryan Betty, said there is a backlog of 50,000 cervical smears while some GPs are working seven-day weeks and long hours to keep up with demand.
"Immunisation rates had dropped to about 70 percent coverage for 6-month-olds, we have seen a backlog of 50,000 cervical smears and we know there is a massive backlog of routine appointments that are being squeezed due to a capacity issue," Betty said.
"Overall it's appalling for men"
Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer, and the third most common cause of cancer deaths, among New Zealand men, while around one in ten New Zealand men will develop prostate cancer at some stage in their lifetime, according to Southern Cross.
"I don't know if you can blame my delays on COVID. When I pushed back to the hospital and said this is unacceptable, their response was 'there is a lot of men like you'", he said.
"Four thousand men a year contract prostate cancer in New Zealand and it's clear the system is not set up for them.
"My view would be since it's the largest killer of men outside of skin cancer, there should be a system like there is for women with breast cancer.
"For men, there is absolutely nothing, it's all on the initiative of the male to chase the system to make it work for them."
Ritchie believes the public health care system has failed him but overall it's appalling for men.
"It's not just the wait time, it's the procedure as well," he said. "First of all, to have a PSMA PET-CT scan, that procedure isn't available in the public sector.
"That scans my entire body and picks up cancer throughout the body through to a very minute level.
"Then the prefered treatment is to get four gold specs inserted around the prostate, which then targets the radiation to kill the cancer, that procedure also is not available for people in the public system. So it's not just volume, it's capabilities and quality of service as well.
"Totally unacceptable"
Dr Gregory agreed with Ritchie saying the delays to a cancer diagnosis is "totally unacceptable".
"Sadly not, I have heard of other stories with similar delays of patients waiting to even get a diagnosis of cancer and obviously the stress on someone who might have a cancer diagnosis then waiting that long to get a biopsy is really distressing and never mind the potential outcomes that might result from that so it's not an isolated incident, unfortunately," Dr Gregory told AM.
Gregory believes the lack of funding has caused New Zealand's health care system to fall behind in comparison to other countries around the world and believes it "has to change".
The National Health Service (NHS) in England says it aims for 28 days from referral to find out you have cancer and for breast cancer diagnoses, the aim is 14 days.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told AM on Monday the delay Ritchie experienced doesn't "seem right to me".
"Broadly speaking, we tried to make sure that by keeping COVID at bay as long as we did, we could continue those treatments," Ardern told AM.
"Happy again just to have a closer look at what happened in the individual case you brought up, the gentleman with prostate [cancer]. Some of those delays just didn't seem right to me. It shouldn't be what a person is experiencing.
"But I can't speak to a clinician's decisions. But I will ask the team to go and look at some of that experience because you're right, those delays don't square with what the Cancer Control Agency has found."
Ardern said the whole point of New Zealand's COVID response was so people could still have access to other health care besides COVID.
"We saw in other countries when hospital systems were overwhelmed, people with cancer, for instance, weren't getting the care and treatment that they needed when they needed it," she told AM.
"Now the question of whether or not people were getting the diagnosis and treatment, the cancer control agency has been monitoring this. There was a period in August of last year when Delta first hit, we saw a bit of a change in numbers there. But according to the analysis by the cancer control agency that appears to have recovered … but essentially what they're saying at this point is that diagnosis appears to be keeping pace with what we've seen in the past."
