Elective surgery is being put off in hospitals around the country as the winter respiratory illness season drags on into spring, with Health New Zealand saying acute patients have to be treated first.
In a story published on Monday morning, RNZ reported that Health New Zealand national chief medical officer Dame Helen Stokes-Lampard said patient numbers are above historic winter levels, and that the pressure is expected to continue for at least another three to four weeks. Numbers have come down from what she described as the “exceptionally high levels” seen in August, but not far enough to take the pressure off wards.
“The decision to defer care is not taken lightly and all decisions are made on a case-by-case basis by clinical teams with patient safety and wellbeing as the highest priority,” Stokes-Lampard said. “Surgeries are always rescheduled for the next available opportunity, and we consider the acuity of a patient’s condition to ensure those with the highest need are treated first.”
At Middlemore Hospital in Auckland, Health New Zealand said staff are being redeployed and overtime shifts offered to cope with the number of people arriving at the emergency department.
The scale of the August peak explains why the backlog has not cleared. There were 177 people admitted to four Auckland hospitals with severe acute respiratory illness between 9 and 16 August, up from 125 the week before, according to figures from the New Zealand Institute for Public Health and Forensic Science, formerly ESR. That was the highest weekly rate for Auckland since 2015, and the highest since that reporting began in 2012.
Public health physician Dr Hannah Cooper, from the institute’s health intelligence team, told RNZ the numbers matched what hospitals were reporting. “It’s a particularly severe week of winter illness, which I think really corroborates what’s being reported from all the frontline health services about how busy they are,” she said.
What made this winter different was the mix. In comments released by the Science Media Centre on 20 August, Cooper said the surge was driven mainly by influenza, “which are close to the high levels seen in 2022”, but that “other respiratory virus activity is higher, particularly RSV and rhinovirus, contributing to the very high overall picture”. Covid-19 activity, she said, remained very low.
The dominant strain was influenza A H3 subclade K, the variant that ran through the northern hemisphere earlier this year. Cooper said it “has evolved to be quite different to other influenza A/H3 strains that have circulated in recent seasons and so there is little natural immunity in the population, contributing to its high transmissibility”. Professor Michael Plank, of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Canterbury, said in the same set of comments that after an unusually late start, “influenza levels have rocketed over the last few weeks and are now close to their highest level in 4 years”.
Dr Ruth Semprini, a senior clinical research fellow at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, set out the mechanism that turns a busy emergency department into a cancelled operation. “In order to cope, hospitals are cancelling planned surgeries and using those beds for emergency admissions from the emergency department,” she said. Her own department, she said, was “currently always over capacity, with people waiting in corridors overnight, awaiting admission to hospital”.
For patients, a deferral is rarely a simple diary change. Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director Sarah Dalton told RNZ’s Morning Report that about 200 members attended a conference last week and nobody in the room worked in a service that was not under pressure. She said she was very aware of the disruption to patients, some of whom had stopped eating ahead of surgery only to have the procedure cancelled at the last minute, while others had arranged leave and childcare for an operation that did not happen.
Dalton was blunt about the preparation. “The idea that you can pump a few million bucks and a handful of workers into our hospitals a few weeks before winter and that will help is just magical thinking,” she said.
That is a reference to the winter plan announced by Health Minister Simeon Brown on 17 March, which put an extra $25 million towards up to 378 full-time equivalent staff, 71 extra winter hospital beds, and up to 567 short stay beds in aged residential care to free up hospital capacity. It also promised seasonal winter wards at Middlemore, Waikato, Wellington and Christchurch hospitals. The Health New Zealand board endorsed the plan on 3 March.
“Hospitals will still face high levels of demand this winter,” Brown said at the time. “But by planning early, expanding capacity, and supporting our frontline teams, we are giving them the tools, resources, and flexibility they need to better manage pressure, reduce delays, and deliver care for New Zealanders.”
The New Zealand Nurses Organisation did not agree that it worked. In a statement issued on 18 August, delegate and Waikato Hospital emergency nurse Tracy Chisholm said members were asking where the plan had gone. “The promised rapid ward still hasn’t eventuated. There is no sign of the extra beds. We still have bed block and non-urgent patients taking up space in ED,” she said. She argued the plan did not address chronic understaffing, which she called the greatest problem facing hospitals.
Every deferred operation also pushes against one of the government’s own five health targets, which asks that 95 per cent of patients wait less than four months for elective treatment. The most recent published quarter, January to March 2026, came in at 64.9 per cent, up from 57.3 per cent a year earlier, with 51,089 people treated from the elective waitlist. That is real improvement, and it is still more than 30 percentage points short of the target, before a late influenza season takes beds back out of the planned care system in August and September.
Some of those watching the season think the answer is better warning rather than more beds. Professor Michael Baker, of the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago in Wellington, argued for a standing respiratory risk framework of the kind New Zealand already uses for weather and fire danger. “Aotearoa New Zealand already uses graduated systems to communicate changing risks from weather, fire danger and other hazards,” he said, asking whether the country should also have a nationally understood system telling people when respiratory risk is low, when it is rising, and what they can do about it.
For now, the message from Health New Zealand is that the worst week has passed, and that the next month will still be difficult.
Have you had an operation deferred this winter, or worked a shift through it? Tell us what happened in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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