Plans to cut MRI waiting list
THE Southern District Health Board has approved a potential $1.2 million plan to try to eliminate an MRI waiting list so long that patients can linger for eight months before their scan is performed.
The Ministry of Health target for magnetic resonance imaging scans is that 85% of them be completed within 42 days of a referral. The Southern DHB achieves around 33%.
That backlog is one of the reasons why the radiology department recently lost its IANZ accreditation — a grading the SDHB hopes to reapply for next month.
The SDHB’s MRI Recovery Plan — just released to the Otago Daily Times under the Official Information Act — said Dunedin’s waiting list of 796 patients appeared to be due to demand exceeding supply.
Southland’s 685 personlong waiting list was partly due to four of the five trained medical radiation technologist (MRT) staff in the service having left by December 2015, meaning there was a lengthy period when Southland could not run a full Monday to Friday operation.
‘‘The service has actively worked on attracting MRI trained MRT staff to the district and on training existing MRT staff in the MRI modality, but efforts to recruit have not been completely successful,’’ the report said.
‘‘From 2015 until now the service has been staffed with a 0.8 FTE MRI trained MRT staff member and two trainees, with a third trainee joining in July 2017.’’
There were now two trained staff at Southland, meaning the service had recently returned to fulltime operation.
However, the risk of losing staff meant a ‘‘structural problem’’ associated with recruitment, training and retention remained, the report said.
The report’s authors considered calling in locums or contracting out MRI services to tackle the backlog, but said using locums would be a ‘‘piecemeal’’ solution, and using another facility would be too expensive — at an estimated $2.3 million.
An alternative plan using a previous supplier and present staff was considered, but was still expensive enough to require a request for proposal to be placed on the Government tendering site.
However, Dunedin MRT staff then proposed a plan using their services to stage clinics on machines sitting idle during the weekend.
‘‘[This] is considerably cheaper than the outsourcing solution we priced up,’’ the report said.
‘‘An outsourced solution may still be required at the Southland site as we remain shortstaffed there.’’
The plan — which aimed to clear the waitlists within nine months — would cost an estimated $924,000, with a recommended extra spend of a maximum $351,000 to maintain performance once the backlog was caught up.
The plan’s success was dependent on MRT staff being recruited to work at Dunedin, the report said.
‘‘It should be noted that the Dunedin solution is more urgent, as we need to be able to articulate that we have a solution in place as part of our application for IANZ reaccreditation.’’
The SDHB commissioners meeting last week was told recruitment agencies had been used to find MRT staff, and some applications had been received.