Medical imaging professionals at Taranaki Base Hospital are holding a stopwork meeting on Friday morning to discuss staff shortages which are causing a backlog of appointments and long delays in reporting scan results.
An advocate for Apex, which represents 15000 radiographers and radiology technologists nationwide, Omar Hamed, said they would be looking to develop solutions.
"We'll be talking to them about what they are seeing and what they see as the problem and then working up a plan to present to the management team at Taranaki Base Hospital.
"To go, 'okay how are we going to fill the gaps for radiographers and sonographers and what are we going to do about getting radiologists able to more promptly report on the images?'
He said one solution might be a national plan
The meeting follows an RNZ story about a New Plymouth woman who waited a month for the results of a semi-urgent pelvic ultrasound.
Health New Zealand apologised to the woman saying the scan results should've been reported back between 7 and 10 days, but it was struggling with staff shortages.
The woman's experience has been reflected in dozens of social media posts, pointing out similar problems including long waits to be seen and to get results.
Health New Zealand said radiologists and radiographrs were in short supply.
"The radiology reporting services at Taranaki Base Hospital are impacted by a national shortage of radiologists. Health New Zealand is recruiting both permanent and locum radiologists.
"We are utilising external reporting providers to reduce the time patients and GPs are waiting on results and are currently renegotiating to increase our contracts with the external providers."
Health New Zealand advised GPs that if a patient experienced a change in their clinical condition whilst waiting for their results, the GP should call the duty radiologist directly to speed up delivery of reports.
This article was first published by RNZ
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