Are early finishes to blame for the surgical backlog? 

Surgeon Chris Wakeman claims that public health professionals won’t perform surgeries past the 4pm cutoff, causing backlog issues.  

Health NZ’s Chief Clinical Officer Dr Richard Sullivan told Mike Hosking that early finishes do occur. 

The rosters generally run until about 4:30/5pm, and he says that there are very few operations that can be done in less than half an hour.  

He says they’ve been running weekend theatres to try get more people through, but you need quite a big work force to do that consistently. 

LISTEN ABOVE