Thu 20 Mar 2014 In: New Zealand Daily News View at Wayback View at NDHA
File Photo The Ministry of Health has listed the improvements it's made to the gender reassignment surgery process, as a transgender group calls for a complete overhaul of the system. The Ministry says there was a hold on any operations while the surgical team “found a coordinator to manage a range of tasks including liaising with consumers and clinicians, organising surgery time and collating information from referrers”. It adds: “The team also needed to find a psychiatrist who would commit to being available to evaluate an individual’s suitability at their surgical assessment, prior to final acceptance for surgery. These roles were filled before publicly funded gender reassignment surgeries resumed.” However, surgeries are now on hold again, due to the retirement of divisive plastic surgeon Peter Walker. It means four MtF surgeries which were supposed to be carried out this month have been postponed. In response to a question about whether the surgeries could be funded and carried out overseas instead, the Ministry has responded by stating it has cabinet approval to publicly fund a set number of gender reassignment surgeries. “The funding covers three male to female surgeries every two years (these are carried out in New Zealand) and one female to male (carried out overseas) every two years.” President of Agender NZ Claudia Mckay is relieved at Walker’s retirement, saying while many have been happy with his work, his "invasive" surgery techniques are little used around the world today. McKay hopes it will be an opportunity for the Ministry to change its approach to the issue. She says because so few surgeries are publicly funded each year, people have gone overseas at their own expense for a long time. “Sometimes to Australia, sometimes America, but in the last 10-plus years the most popular destination was Thailand where there are a number of highly skilled surgeons who have completed hundreds of successful surgeries in world class hospitals with first rate staff and for less cost than what Peter Walker has charged the Government,” she says. “Agender NZ has raised this issue with the Ministry of Health in the past and our pleas have always fallen on deaf ears, but now with Peter Walker’s retirement there is at last hope for the transgender community that at least this problem may be closer to an end.”
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Thursday, 20th March 2014 - 12:30pm