Annette King gets her sums wrong again

Associate Health Minister Jo Goodhew says Opposition Health spokesperson Annette King has got herself involved in what appears to be a mysterious and incompetent attempt to smear the record of South Canterbury DHB.

“In making claims about the DHB’s waiting times for colonoscopies, Mrs King has got her numbers completely wrong,” Mrs Goodhew says.

“She has double and triple counted hundreds of people to try and claim South Canterbury DHB has far more people waiting for non- urgent colonoscopy tests than they actually do.

“Her double, triple and quadruple counting has added up to an inflated and completely incorrect total. If that’s not bad enough, somehow someone has mysteriously changed the official numbers on the DHB’s OIA response, and that changed copy has been forwarded onto a local journalist.

“Mrs King needs to explain why the South Canterbury DHB OIA response has been changed from the original reply. Who did it?

“In fact South Canterbury DHB does very well with its colonoscopy wait times, better than many other DHBs.

“And over all, the entire country is reducing wait times for this diagnostic test. Around 40,000 colonoscopies were performed by DHBs last financial year (2012/13) – a 20 per cent increase compared to 2008/09,” Mrs Goodhew says.

“Labour is being hypocritical here. When they were last in government waiting times were much worse. They were so bad that some hospitals stopped providing regular surveillance colonoscopies to people with a family history of bowel cancer.

“And in 2006 1,000 Canterbury people waiting for a colonoscopy were culled from waiting lists in the same year.

“Mrs King needs to come clean. Labour’s criticism is just silly politics.”

ends

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