Media release from Waikato District Health Board

BreastScreen Midland is finally able to invite ALL eligible Waikato women for their free two-yearly mammograms.

With help from the wider Waikato District Health Board and some hard graft within their own team, the service has successfully caught up on an 1800 mammogram backlog in Hamilton, causing headaches from 22 months ago.

Since its peak in June 2008, women previously enrolled in the programme were the priority for screening, said Screening Services manager Clare Coles.

She said the backlog that affected other Hamilton women was largely due to the nationwide medical radiation technologist shortage in 2008/09 and that with help from Human Resources, Radiology Services, private radiology providers and some LEAN thinking, Screening Services are back on track.

"It just goes to show the power of working with other areas of the organisation and not just taking the problem on, all on your own. I'm a great believer in using the experts around me," said Mrs Coles.

"A meeting was set up with Waikato DHB Radiology Services manager Mike Webb and Recruitment and we really looked outside the box as to what our barriers were with recruitment and how we could manage the staff shortage with our own resources."

From that meeting, Mrs Coles said they identified MRT recruitment and retention issues such as the required weeks away from home for MRTs when they manned the breast screening mobile outside of Hamilton.

"As a result, sub-contractors Bay Radiology and Lakes Radiology now run their own mobile screening vans so Waikato staff don't need to travel as far.  Their cooperation in this change as well as other acts of support have made a big difference to the overall picture," she said

"We now also share MRTs with the DHB's main Radiology Service, which has been fantastic and gives us more capacity for appointments and a better working environment for the MRTs as they have a more reasonable workload and work hours, and a bit of variety for some of them."

The service also took on another sub-contractor in Hamilton, which has helped them to catch up.

"Once our staffing situation started to come right, we needed to work out how to make our way through the backlog and reach our target, and it was a course in LEAN thinking that my colleague and I attended that really made the difference," said Mrs Coles.

"The course taught us how to identify the problem, the goal and how we could achieve it. We worked out that 80 was the magic number for us. To reach our 70 per cent target, and clear the backlog, we needed to screen 80 women per day.

"We started to monitor our numbers daily and that was the goal - 80 mammograms - sometimes we did more, but we made sure we never did less - and now we're here - we've done it."

Mrs Coles put a morning tea on for her staff to thank them for all the hard work, and more importantly for hanging in there when times got tough and remaining positive.

"But, there are certainly other services and key people within Health Waikato who we could not have done it without, so sincere thanks must go to them for their teamwork and willingness to work with us."

Free clinics

Any women aged between 45-69 years, is eligible for free mammograms.
There are free clinics on some Saturday mornings for Maori women at the Breast Care Centre.

Just ring 0800 270 200 for more information or to make an appointment.