Steve McKinnon has months to live as aggressive cancer spreads through his body.

Health New Zealand has apologised to the Hastings car dealer, an admission that its standard of care has failed him.

Now he won’t see his grandchild grow up.

“They said sorry, but that’s not going to give me my life back,” McKinnon said.

“The hardest part is the acceptance that I’m not going to be here for birthdays or Christmas.

“My granddaughter is 15 months old and she’s not going to remember me.”

Last year, Hawke’s Bay Today reported on McKinnon’s frustration that his scheduled colonoscopy was delayed for 14 months. After it went ahead he was diagnosed with stage three bowel cancer, forcing him to close his business to fight the disease.

It turned out that was just the start.

McKinnon described it as a “comedy of errors” inside the health system, but he’s not laughing.

Health New Zealand has acknowledged the shortcomings in his care and said systemic processes in the region needed improvement.

It said it is implementing changes, including a new room for colonoscopy and improvements in referral triage and management processes.

The key error after the delayed colonoscopy was that the 76-year-old’s bowel cancer wasn’t actually bowel cancer.

It was rectal cancer, which is now stage four and terminal. He has been told he has until October to live.

McKinnon said what followed the first diagnosis was a string of delays, miscommunication and treatment issues that he believes contributed to the cancer spreading quietly and aggressively into his liver.

“Nothing that was scheduled to be done was done correctly and on time,” he said.

“We had the operation, which they said would be for the bowel cancer, and it wasn’t.

“They couldn’t even find it because it was actually in the rectum.

“The keyhole surgery turned out not to be successful, so they had to slice me open, and then when they found it, they had to take about two feet [60cm of tumour] out.”

The surgery happened in March last year and it was followed by five weeks of radiation treatment in Palmerston North and chemotherapy afterwards.

It was about six weeks after McKinnon’s surgery when he was told the problem was rectal cancer and he should not have been operated on first.

McKinnon said further delays occurred when referrals for chemotherapy in Hawke’s Bay “slipped through”, forcing him and his wife, Lynette McKinnon, to repeatedly chase the hospital for updates.

Some later chemotherapy pauses were medically necessary because the treatment had caused McKinnon infections and further hospitalisations.

During his treatment, around September last year, McKinnon was sent for a chemotherapy port insertion – a small device implanted under the skin to make chemotherapy easier – only to arrive and be told no doctor was available to perform the procedure.

Instead, a temporary PICC line was inserted into his arm.

“Then they gave me a piece of paper with all the measurements and specifics of the PICC line that went into my arm and told me to take it to the chemotherapy ward, rather than them putting it into a computer,” he said.

“So, here I am, coming out of an operating theatre, half dopey, carrying around this piece of paper.

“Several days later, we arrived at the chemotherapy ward, and they told me, ‘Oh, we’d been looking for that’. So here I am, the patient and the courier all at the same time.”

McKinnon said later scans showed the cancer had spread to his liver.

A gut punch came with it – a medical report stating that had his colonoscopy happened within the 45-day recommended timeframe, the cancer likely would have been caught much earlier.

“I would probably still be alive today, still be running our business.”

McKinnon said he lost out financially when he shut Beresford Auto Sales because he was forced into a “fire sale” of stock.

Despite his anger, McKinnon said he still believed many frontline health staff were doing their best.

“There are some fabulous people there, but somewhere along the line, things fall down that just don’t get done.”

Hawke’s Bay Health NZ group director of operations David Warrington said the organisation undertook a review into McKinnon’s care and met with him and his family to apologise “for the failure in care provided”.

“This is not the level of care we aspire to in our region,” Warrington said.

He said changes had since been made, including opening a third endoscopy procedure room to increase colonoscopy capacity, improving referral triage and management processes, and introducing better clinical oversight for patients on waitlists.

Warrington said a new national faecal immunochemical test for symptomatic patients was also expected to improve prioritisation and help identify high-risk patients earlier.