Health officials have responded angrily to the naming of six laboratories identified by the Health Funding Authority for low reporting rates of potentially serious cervical abnormalities.
The names of the laboratories have been released by the Health Ministry on the advice of the Ombudsman, in statistics relating to 31 hospital and community laboratories.
Their reporting rates, covering mid-1991 to mid-1994, are shown to be equal to, or lower than, those of Dr Michael Bottrill, whose misreporting of cervical cancer tests was the subject of the Gisborne inquiry.
The laboratories named are Valley Diagnostic, Wellington; Christchurch-based Cardinal Laboratory; Pathlab Hamilton; Medlab South, Christchurch; Diagnostic Nelson; and Auckland Diagnostic.
The reporting rates ranged from 0.4 per cent to 0.6 per cent, compared with the community average of 0.8 per cent.
But officials said yesterday that the revelations were meaningless. The figures were not only old but could not be correlated to poor practices.
Neither Health Minister Annette King nor the ministry would talk about the figures, but a ministry statement urged caution in their reading.
The later Health Funding Authority Review of Cervical Cytology Practice in New Zealand Community Laboratories, 1990-1999, tabled with the Gisborne inquiry this year, identified six laboratories targeted for closer scrutiny.
But though unnamed, it is understood they are not those in the ministry report.
In July, the authority named five hospital laboratories working without accreditation, calling them a problem.
These were attached to hospitals in Wairoa, Taupo, Dargaville, the Bay of Islands and Kaitaia but, again, bore no relationship to the low-reporting labs just named.
The ministry's statement said the statistics should not be used in isolation, as they were only one component in considering performance. "Much depends on the characteristics of the screened population and the proportion of the women being screened who had opted to have their names and details recorded on the register.
"The information is from the early years of the programme when fewer results were on the register and enrolment was increasing - in 1994 only 55 per cent of eligible women were enrolled compared with 69 per cent in 1995, 81 per cent in 1996 and 89 per cent now."
The ministry said that data may also have changed due to corrections or the removal of some results by request.
"This data could reflect unfairly on any laboratory," it said.
Valley Diagnostic pathologist Dr Karen Wood said that her laboratory's apparent low reporting had been largely the result of a computer transcription error that had incorrectly transferred lists of patients in a coded report from high grade to low.
"We are in line with the national average," Dr Wood said.
The figures as published also failed to take into account their relationship to the local population's incidence of disease.
The authority's report had shown a relatively low incidence of cervical cancer for Wellington and the Hutt, with an extrapolated 16.7 cases per 100,000 among women aged between 20 and 69, during the reporting period.
Highest rates were in Bay of Plenty (33.3), Tairawhiti (30), Taranaki (26.1) and Northland (26).
- NZPA
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