10 November 2022
AS Van Wey
[FYI request #20882 email]
Kia ora AS Van Wey
Your Official Information Act request, reference: GOV-021317
Thank you for your request of 17 October 2022, asking for the following information under the Official
Information Act 1982 (the Act):
I am fol owing up on a request made earlier this year to ACC: OIA reference: GOV-018467. Thank
you for providing the total number of medical treatment injury or medical misadventure claims that
were submitted to ACC between 1 July 2016 and 30 June 2021. I am writing to request further
detail. In particular, for each of the years 1 January 2016 to present, please provide the total of
cancer and non-cancer related medical treatment injury or medical misadventure claims submitted
to ACC which were related to care obtained at what is now known as Te Whatu Ora Health NZ
Waikato (aka Waikato District Health Board) or one of their contracted providers (e.g., Hamilton
Radiology, Midland MRI, Pathlab, etc.).
ACC does not routinely record cancer-related data
Identifying more recent cancer-related claims would require substantial collation and research, as we
would have to do a manual clinical review of all new treatment injury claims to determine whether they
were cancer-related. As such, we are refusing to provide the claims data requested for 30 June 2021
onwards. This decision has been made under section 18(f) of the Act.
The claims below are flagged if they existed in the data pool of accepted cancer claims that was extracted
and reviewed by our clinical services team in July 2021. Consistent with our response of 22 June 2022 (Ref
GOV-018467) the data provided covers claims accepted between 1 July 2016 and 30 June 2021.
The requested information is provided in the table below
Please consider the following points when interpreting the data provided:
• ‘Misdiagnosis’ is a subset of treatment omission. ACC does not record the events for misdiagnosis
routinely. However, for the purposes of this request, claims that were marked as ‘treatment
omission’ have been included.
• The data was extracted on 17 June 2022 and may differ if extracted again at a later date.
Table 1: Number of accepted claims in Waikato DHB by financial year of claim lodgement
Year
Cancer-related
Not Cancer-related
2016/17
4
16
2017/18
6
13
2018/19
0
12
2019/20
6
12
2020/21
<4
8
GOV-021317 Page 1 of 2
Please some values in the table only indicate that the claim count is fewer than four (denoted as <4) to limit
the potential for individuals or matters specific to certain individuals from being identified. Withholding the
data in this way is necessary to protect our clients’ privacy.
This decision has been made under section 9(2)(a) of the Act. In doing so, we have considered the public
interest in making the information available and have determined that it does not outweigh the need to
protect our clients’ privacy.
If you have any questions about this response, please get in touch
You can email me a
t [email address]. If you are not happy with this response, you can also
contact the Ombudsman via
[email address] or by phoning 0800 802 602. Information
about how to make a complaint is available at
www.ombudsman.parliament.nz.
Ngā mihi
Sara Freitag
Acting Manager Official Information Act Services
Government Engagement
GOV-021317 Page 2 of 2
Document Outline
