A patient says she's scared and anxious about the increasing delays in her cancer treatment and can feel her chances of being cured "slipping away".
It took Allison Kennedy two months to get a mammogram after being referred by her GP before she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Kennedy eventually underwent chemotherapy before having surgery in October but has been told her necessary radiation treatment won't start until early next year.
The Breast Cancer Foundation has long said the health system hadn't kept up with cancer screening due to COVID-19 disruptions and has urged the Government to act.
"That promise of a 'cure', I just see that slipping away from me," Kennedy said of her treatment delays.
"I just feel like if we don't resolve this problem, we're going to see more people back in the health system for no reason," she told AM.
Kennedy said she felt like her treatment and chances of making a full recovery were stumbling at the final hurdle because of the delays.
The Breast Cancer Foundation said that, sadly, Kennedy's story wasn't surprising.
"I'm not surprised but I am worried that a woman… is waiting this long - it's just not OK," foundation research manager Adele Gautier told AM on Tuesday.
"What the research shows is that waiting more than eight weeks after surgery to have radiation therapy doubles the chance of breast cancer coming back in the breast."
Gautier said the delays could result in devastating consequences.
"Unfortunately, when your cancer comes back in the breast, it increases your chances of it coming back outside of the breast and by that time, it is incurable."
The prospect of cancer coming back was a terrifying one for Kennedy.
"I feel really scared because we're talking about the breast cancer coming back in the breast and I already know that I've got a little bit of it in the lymph nodes," she said. "So I already know that my cancer is aggressive enough and smart enough to have worked its way out of that area of treatment."
Gautier said New Zealand was facing a shortage of radiation oncologists, which was contributing to the problem.
"This has been around before COVID and is something that's been needing to be addressed for a long time."
She said there were shortages in other areas as well.
"We also have a shortage of the linear accelerators that are used to do the [radiation] treatment, we have a shortage of medical physicists who calibrate the machines and make sure everything's working properly and the radiation therapists who actually do the treatment - so it just goes on and on."
AM requested comment from Te Whatu Ora/Health New Zealand on the matter, which said it would respond by the end of Tuesday.
In October, the new national health service came up with 101 recommendations to fix the huge backlog of people waiting for operations and specialist appointments.
