Call for wider funding for oral cancers tests
DUNEDIN’S School of Dentistry is urging wider funding support for lifesaving oral cancer tests provided by the country’s only dedicated dental pathology service.
This ‘‘life and death service’’ protected patients throughout the country by identifying cancer of the tongue, gums and elsewhere in the mouth, University of Otago school dean Prof Mike Morgan said yesterday.
“Poor dental health can have devastating impacts on people’s lives, and the lack of an oral pathology service would quite simply result in unnecessary death,’’ Prof Morgan said.
New Zealand should have a ‘‘serious conversation’’ about these funding anomalies, he said.
The university was ‘‘more than happy’’ to run the service but it should be ‘‘worthy of government support’’.
Every year throughout the country, more than 3000 tissue samples were taken by dentists when abnormalities were found in a patient’s mouth and needed further investigation.
Often, the results indicated lifethreatening conditions, including cancers.
However, because of an unintended legislation mixup in the 1990s, pathology laboratories were not funded from the overall health budget to test specimens taken by dentists.
Instead, Otago’s oral pathology diagnostic service had taken on much of this task and was funding oral pathology testing.
Over the years, the university had unsuccessfully asked for the funding anomaly to be addressed.
Now, because of the financial constraints caused by Covid19, the university’s ability to absorb the lab’s costs was becoming untenable, Prof Morgan said.
The tests averaged about $300 each, and the service’s annual cost was about $1 million.
The university was not threatening to cut the service, Prof Morgan said.
Doing that would cost dozens of lives every year and interrupt Otago teaching and research — but paying for it in future would mean other core university functions would be sacrificed, he said.
Otago Oral Pathology Centre head Prof Alison Rich said the death rate from oral cancer was at least as high as melanoma and breast cancer.
A Ministry of Health spokesman said yesterday the university and the New Zealand Dental Association had previously raised this matter with the ministry, and again recently.
The matter was ‘‘being explored’’ by the ministry.
Patients received a government subsidy for the cost of laboratory and pathology services, such as biopsies and blood tests, to diagnose oral conditions if the request came from a general medical practitioner, an oral surgeon, or an oral and maxillofacial surgeon.
However, no government subsidy was available if the laboratory or pathology test was requested by a dentist or some dental specialists working in private practice, the spokesman said.