Clinic cuts will affect 150 patients, critics say

Critics say rural diabetes clinics will be cut, about 150 people with complex diabetes will struggle to get help and more patients will turn up in the emergency department needing longer hospital stays, if planned funding cuts to the Diabetes Lifestyle Centre go ahead.

About 10 concerned advocates, including nurses and a doctor, raised their concerns at the MidCentral Health Board's hospital advisory committee meeting yesterday.

"I cannot understand the rationale for it," said Diabetes Manawatu secretary Kathy Scott, who attended the meeting. One nurse and a part-time administrator would go, at a saving of about $100,000 a year, if the board rubber-stamps the decision in two weeks.

Mrs Scott said the board had reviewed the specialist centre looking for duplication between its work and that being done by primary health services, and found none.

However, the review showed the centre was doing more work than it was being paid to do, running $155,000 over budget in the last year.

She said the fact board members were prepared to make cuts despite the information they had about diabetes being a growing health problem, showed they did not understand the progressive nature of the disease.

"If we can save just two people from going into kidney failure and needing dialysis in the next 12 months, at a cost of $60,000 a person each year, then those are the savings they want," Mrs Scott said.

Several committee members spoke against making the cuts, but only Barbara Robson asked for her dissenting vote to be recorded.

She said the board had invested heavily in employing nurses to help manage diabetes in the community. The effectiveness of their work should have been reviewed, as well as that of the specialist service, before deciding where any savings could be made.

She and committee member Cynric Temple-Camp said the review did not tell them what impact the cuts they were being asked to make would have on patients.

"I want to know where those extra patients will go," Dr Temple-Camp said. "To the ED [emergency department]? Their GP? A primary care nurse?"

Diabetes Lifestyle Centre team leader and nurse practitioner Helen Snell was at the meeting, but was not invited to answer.

The committee has asked the board for a review of diabetes spending across the district with a view to ensuring better links exist between community and specialist care.

- © Fairfax NZ News