ACC pays $9m after bungled tests

NEARLY 1000 people have received ACC payouts for bungled radiology tests in the past 10 years, including some who became terminally ill as a result.

Figures issued under the Official Information Act show ACC paid $9.3 million for 969 claims from July 1, 2005, to December 31, 2014. They also show annual claims have more than doubled since 2006, and payouts have nearly quadrupled.

The cases include Taranaki woman Judith Holswich, who is now dying of lung cancer after a radiologist failed to follow up on an abnormal scan, which delayed her diagnosis for three years.

On Thursday, she returned to her Waitara home after eight days at Hospice Taranaki, her second stay there in the past three weeks.

‘‘When it does eventually happen, I want to die in my own home,’’ the 55-year-old said.

‘‘If they [radiologists] had done their job correctly, I wouldn’t be in this situation.’’

Holswich was awarded more than $100,000 from ACC in April, but others are still fighting.

An Auckland woman’s sevenyear legal battle for compensation is yet to be resolved after her daughter was born with spina bifida in 2007. Doctors had missed signs of the birth defect during a 20-week antenatal scan.

The woman told the Court of Appeal in 2013 that she would have sought to terminate her pregnancy if the condition had been diagnosed at the scan.

Mammography was singled out as the most fraught procedure during the past decade, with 125 ACC claims for various injuries, including bruising, joint injuries, plus strains and sprains. CT scans were the second highest source of claims.

In 2011, ACC highlighted the case of an unnamed 35-year-old whose cervical smear test results were misread as normal. It was only a year later, after she began experiencing various symptoms, that doctors diagnosed her cervical cancer.

In the 10-year period, ACC accepted claims from 32 people for ‘‘treatment omission’’, which included a delay or failure to treat someone, such as when a radiologist failed to diagnose a condition that showed up on imaging.

New Zealand’s worst radiology failure occurred at a Gisborne laboratory in the 1990s and led to a commission of inquiry after Dr Michael Bottrill misread hundreds of 12,500 cervical smear slides, interpreting high-grade abnormalities as normal. As a result, dozens of women developed cervical cancer and some died. Bottrill died in July 2014.

Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists’ New Zealand branch chairman Lance Lawler said such cases were ‘‘a doctor’s worst nightmare’’, but mistakes were unavoidable because of human error.

‘‘I don’t think you will ever stop these events happening . . . Good people make honest mistakes sometimes.’’

However, he said more sophisticated auditing and peer review requirements were being introduced across the medical profession, including radiology, to try to reduce the chance of mistakes.

Lawler, a Wellington-based radiologist, estimated about 3 million radiology tests were done in New Zealand annually, suggesting about 30 million over the decade.

‘‘That means 30 [mistake] cases out of 30 million. But we don’t want any mistakes, and we don’t want anyone to suffer.’’

Of the $9.3m paid out by ACC, $5.9m was paid for compensation, and the rest was for treatment and rehabilitation.

Last year, $1.2m was paid in compensation.

People suffering permanent injuries from treatment, including radiology tests, can claim lumpsum compensation of up to $133,000, depending on their level of impairment.

An ACC spokeswoman said the largest payouts went to those who had suffered more than 80 per cent impairment, including those who were terminally ill.

Capital & Coast District Health Board had 58 radiology treatment injury claims in the past decade, including 12 last year, and had the third highest claim rate after Auckland and Canterbury districts.