Nurse shortage delays urgent children's ops

Hundreds of children are being forced to wait longer for surgery at the country's leading paediatric hospital as it struggles with a shortage of theatre nurses.

Many patients at the Starship children's hospital in Auckland already wait far longer than the Government benchmark of six months for non-urgent surgery, and the delays have got worse.

"I've never seen it so bad," one doctor said yesterday.

An orthopaedic surgeon said at least 40 per cent of his elective surgery theatre lists were being cancelled.

In ear, nose and throat surgery, planning is under way to cancel 50 theatre lists - of up to six patients each - in the March 1 to May 20 period.

But Fiona Ritsma, the Auckland District Health Board's general manager of clinical specialty services, said the high number of postponements would occur only if an aggressive recruitment drive failed to attract enough nurses.

Eleven scheduled ear, nose and throat theatre lists had been postponed in the past four weeks because of the nursing shortage, she said.

The hospital is nine short of the 36 theatre nurses it needs.

Children needing tonsils removed wait about a year for surgery at Starship. The wait for grommets to be inserted in ears has been up to eight weeks, until February, but is now three to four months.

Those needing a tonsillectomy are at risk of recurrent infections, inflamed tonsils and, in a few cases, retarded growth. Grommets are inserted to treat "glue ear", an infection of the middle ear. Middle-ear infections are a common cause of temporary hearing loss, which can interfere with speech and language development.

The orthopaedic surgeon said some of his patients already faced a year's wait.

"For progressive deformity in children the waiting list has been completely out of control for a while and now it's getting worse.

"As kids grow their deformities get worse and then it becomes harder to fix them and the risk of complications is greatly increased ... The cost increases as well.

"Patients need to find out what's available and what's not in a public hospital. The Government and the hospital have to come clean and say how bad it is and give people an idea how long their realistic wait is going to be, rather than fudging.

"There's people who need to have surgery now who are going to be waiting more than a year for surgery."

Ms Ritsma said the health board's theatre nurse shortages were worst at Starship, but also affected Auckland City Hospital and other New Zealand hospitals.

She said some nurses had left to work in Europe during the northern summer and others had been hired to work at the expanding Waitakere Hospital.

"We are trying every recruitment tactic possible, but the international shortage of experienced nurses is making vacancies hard to fill."

An organiser for the Nurses Organisation, Jane Kostanich, said it was hoped the nursing pay rises, which start to take effect next month, would help to attract nurses back.