By Jane Luscombe
Doctors say they are changing the way they treat some patients just so they can avoid sending them for blood tests.
They blame a new service rolled out to the whole of Auckland today, which they say is flawed and risking people’s health.
Dr Jodie O’Sullivan says she is fed up with wasting half her patients’ appointment times waiting for someone at Labtests to pick up the phone.
“It’s actually starting to affect our clinical practices because it’s so difficult to get lab tests for patients” she said.
Dr Carmel Built agrees and so do some patients. They have been asking if they should pay privately for tests at former provider Diagnostic Medlab.
Labtests chief executive Ulf Lindskog says a few hitches are inevitable when you set up a service of this size. They have handled more than 400 thousand tests since their first centre opened a month ago.
Three quarters of calls were dealt with within three and a half minutes today and they have sorted out queuing problems too.
“I’m not surprised with what we are seeing here, it’s basically just we are working through the issues with the clinicians, and thank them for their patience” said Lindskog.
One patient, Noelene Wilson, had no trouble with queues, but was made to wait four days for the results of a test, and then Labtests got it wrong.
Not all doctors are unhappy though.
“My own experience of it is we are getting good information from the company and timely results. For me that’s the important thing” said Dr David Jansen.
Labtests says all problems will be smoothed out within a couple of weeks.
3 News