Stewart Barbara: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStewart Barbara: General Debate[Sitting date: 22 August 2007. Volume:641;Page:11363. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]BARBARA STEWART (NZ First): Kiwi cancer patients are suffering needlessly because the technology that could streamline their treatment is not available publicly here in New Zealand and it is not likely to be for quite some time. It is not fair it is notjust and it is blatantly wrong. The Ministry of Health has been dithering around about the purchase of a publicly funded PET scanner which is a positron emission tomography scanner since mid-2005 and we are still no closer. A recent TV3 news report stated that we are about 3 years away from that—3 long years. It is a totally unbelievable wait for cancer sufferers and for cancer doctors who are also pushing for one of these publicly funded PET scanners.It is a fact that these scanners have been available in Australia since 1992. The patient is injected with a very small amount of radioactive glucose which provides a very clear image of cancer sites and gives doctors a very clear indication of the stage of the tumour and what treatment is required and of course it is used for monitoring after the therapy to see whether the tumour is still alive. PET scanning has become a benchmark for staging cancer and New Zealanders have great difficulty accessing it. An 84 percent accuracy in the diagnosis of cancer is as important as an 86 percent specificity of the rate of cancer. Basically a PET scanner ensures the best treatment option for that particular patient.Over in Australia—and I am definitely not one to push the boat of Australia—they work on a ratio of having one to 1.5 publicly funded PET scanners for every 1 million of their population. They currently have 16 scanners in 13 locations seven contracted facilities and one cyclotron to produce the radioactive material for every four scanners. So the Australians have at least four cyclotrons and they are actually looking at increasing their PET facilities.In New Zealand we do not have a publicly funded scanner. We would love to have one. We would like to have one cyclotron as well. It would be very beneficial. Two would be beyond belief. What do we have here in New Zealand? We have patients travelling to Australia at their own expense. Last year 43 patients paid their own way to Australia for a scan and 53 patients were funded by district health boards. I would imagine that not one of those patients came from the far north or the East Coast. There is a facility at Wakefield Hospital and some private patients and some very fortunate people from Capital and Coast actually get to use it. The glucose solution is flown in from Australia pretty regularly.We need our own facility in New Zealand. We know that it could cost up to $20 million to set one up but one surgeon estimated that the savings on lung cancer alone could be up to $600000 per year. Overall it has been estimated that at least $3.5 million is wasted on unnecessary surgery for cancer patients. We know that cancer causes 29 percent of all deaths in this country and it is estimated that by 2011 this will increase to 47 percent which is estimated to be 22000 cancer patients.Research that could save lives and expedite treatment should be a priority for the Ministry of Health. But what has happened? The bureaucracy is spinning into action and committees have been formed—a real committee-fest. The Cancer Treatment Working Party presented a report to the Ministry of Health in mid-2005. The National Service and Technology Review Advisory Committee provided an update to the Minister of Health in November 2006. We have a Service Planning and New Health Intervention Assessment committee looking at new health interventions. That committee is somehow involved. Then the business case was considered by the national District Health Boards chief executive group in June 2007 and it was turned down. The chief executive officer group decided that it was too costly without adequate justification of additional patient benefit which is ridiculous.