Christchurch patients face longer than expected delays receiving biopsy results, including skin cancers diagnoses, because of a pathologist shortage.

Canterbury Southern Community Laboratories wrote to GPs and private clinics highlighting the delays.

Chief Executive Dr Peter Gootjes and Medical Director Dr Peter Fitzgerald said the lack of histopathologists available to report Canterbury community histology now means there is an increase in backlog of unreported cases.

There were 971 samples waiting to be diagnosed as of 31 May.

“We expect the backlog to keep growing and delays in turnaround times will increase. We are very sorry about the situation, but unfortunately without a future contract for Community Pathology Services, this is beyond our control.”

Last month the CDHB announced it was moving pathology services ‘in-house’ from July 2022.

Dr Gootjes told Chris Lynch “the real argument is they’ll (CDHB) save money putting two labs into one, but we’ve found out the date it will start, July 1 2022, is the same day DHBs won’t exist anymore.”

He’s asked the CDHB to review the situation, but “they don’t want to review things, but who’s going to take responsibility when it all falls apart, because all the people who made the decisions won’t be there anymore.”

“No one saying we haven’t done a good job, they’ve got good value from us, but doing what they’ve done, is putting a lot of clinical risk in there, because they’ve made the announcement early so we’re having real trouble retaining staff.”

CDHB Chief Executive Dr Peter Bramley said hospital contractor Canterbury Health Laboratories currently has a full complement of anatomical pathologists and is actively recruiting anatomical pathologists to assist with the future workload requirements.

“This is taking place within the context of a national shortage of anatomical pathologists.”

Dr Bramley said the turnaround time of reports from both Canterbury SCL, APHG and CHL are being constantly monitored. 

“So far these reports are showing a speed of result that is within the expected variation seen across the country historically. These will continue to be monitored over the coming weeks.”

“For a number of years now, the DHB and CHL have been committed to the training and development of new pathologists in an effort to respond to the predicted shortfalls in the anatomical pathologist workforce both nationally and internationally. CHL is actively recruiting for a range of positions to support an increase in capacity of this workforce across the Canterbury Health System.”

Cancer Society Medical Director Dr Chris Jackson said pathology services are a key part in diagnosing cancer, and getting rapid access to high quality pathology services is an important part of receiving timely cancer care.

“We think the government should be monitoring time from diagnosis to the start of treatment for all patients with cancer, not just the very limited set of cancer wait time targets that do not give the full picture.”

Dr Jackson said a cancer target that measured time from diagnosis to treatment would identify any impact of delays in key steps like pathology, radiology, and specialist access that are all critical points that can contribute to delays.