Services & Location

Initial appointments are typically scheduled for 45 mins. My reception team will advise you of consultation fees, which vary depending on the ease or complexity of your case. You can make an appointment yourself by directly contacting me, but I usually prefer that you do so via your GP who uses the ERMS system (Electronic Referral Management System). Please ask them to select me specifically from their drop-down menu to ensure that you get to see me only. I will always liaise with your GP about an episode of care with me, to ensure that both parties have a full, accurate and contemporaneous picture of what is going on with your health. If you have been referred to me by a colleague from another speciality, I always reply by letter to them and copy this to your GP.

Minor procedures are sometimes necessary at your initial appointment, such as minor telescope examinations or simple bed-side treatments. My team can advise you in advance of what these procedures might be and any costs associated with them. Please check with your insurer, if you hold health insurance, what costs are recoverable from them.

The nature of my speciality means that examinations can sometimes be intimate: my philosophy is to reduce any awkwardness by always providing a female chaperone to a female patient and by offering all male patients a chaperone if they would like one.

You are welcome to receive a copy, upon request, of any correspondence between me and another health professional relating to you.

Follow-up appointments are typically scheduled for 30 minutes but short follow-up appointments of 15 minutes are sometimes all that are required because of the simplicity of the matter at hand or because physical examination is not required. For patients who have a long way to travel, I try to avoid an in-person appointment wherever possible. Fees for these appointments vary accordingly and are concordant with instructions from leading insurers. Patients returning for a first check-up after surgery are not charged for the appointment since this is included in your surgery invoice. Please note that patients returning to see me more than 12 months after they were discharged from my care are no longer “follow-up” patients, but “new” patients even if the matter is related to their previous problem.

My philosophy is to reduce any awkwardness by always providing a female chaperone to a female patient and by offering all male patients a chaperone if they would like one.

You are welcome to receive a copy, upon request, of any correspondence between me and another health professional relating to you.

Appointments: Access to appointments varies during the year. The traditional Christmas/New Year shutdown reduces availability, but school holidays sometimes increase availability. For most of the year you should be able to see me within 2-4 weeks of me receiving a referral request. I make it clear to GPs that if they are really concerned about their patient they should call me, not just write to me, and I shall do what I can to accommodate them very quickly. Your flexibility helps, such as being able to attend at short notice if a cancellation is spotted in the day(s) ahead.

Surgery and Endoscopy: Endoscopy does necessitate some due diligence be completed beforehand and that (in the case of colonoscopy) you have the correct diet and purging of the bowels beforehand, so there is a minimum wait of 5 days. Most patients can be offered an endoscopy appointment within 2-4 weeks. Again, if there is great urgency to proceed, I will sometimes agree to an “overtime” slot being created on an already full list, or instead offer you the services of a trusted colleague who might be able to oblige sooner than I can. For surgery, the waiting times depend mostly on the need for another specialist (if we are combining forces to operate together) and the duration of the surgery (short cases are easier to accommodate than long complex ones). Wait times are also influenced by public holidays and by the Christmas/New Year hospital closure. Waiting times can be as short as 1 week but rarely longer than 4 weeks if just I am involved in the surgery. You will be offered a selection of dates to choose from to align with your own social or professional diaries. If you are not ready to commit to surgery, you can at any time subsequently ring in to book it with my team.

We take your confidentiality very seriously and handle all your information with utmost care and in compliance with the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020. We have processes in place to secure information that we store about you, ever mindful of the attempts of hackers to access this and cause both you and us harm. In the transmission of information about you to third parties, we ensure that such information is only sent to them via secure networks. Our servers are carefully fire-walled and any cloud-based applications and AI-assisted applications used by us fall under Australian and NZ legal jurisdictions. Human error is the commonest cause of data breaches globally, so our staff members are specifically trained in confidentiality matters and they receive regular updates on this subject.

You are entitled to see all of your medical records held by me and I am very transparent about all results or clinical findings. The results of ultrasound, CT and MRI scans are usually communicated to you in person e.g. at a follow-up appointment, or by phone call follow-up appointment, or by letter. This is usually achieved within 3 weeks of the scan being done. Faecal or blood results follow a similar time-frame and process. I will often wait until the last of the batch of results is in before sharing these with you. I have no problem with you obtaining the hard copies of results if you request these from my secretary or from your GP, but be aware that the explanation, interpretation, understanding and implications of these results can be hard for you to appreciate on your own. For these reasons, I prefer to communicate them to you in a manner that you might better appreciate. It also affords me a chance to advise you of what, if anything, you should do next.

Unlike radiology and laboratory tests, pathology or histology results take longer to reach me because they have to be processed in a laboratory over several days and then reported by a pathologist. Urgent samples e.g. cancer specimens, can be turned around in 3-5 working days, but routine samples can take up to 4 weeks. I will write to you to advise you on your polyp types and the interval recommended for your next procedure, and I’ll either write with other histology results or discuss them with you in a consultation. Rest assured that any important abnormal results will be acted upon very quickly.

Upon receipt of a referral letter from your GP or contact from you, my team will triage the information and decide whether you should see me for a consultation or (if it is a digestive matter) perhaps book you directly in for a colonoscopy or a gastroscopy. They will contact you to set up the appointments and there is some degree of flexibility in the times and days that slots are available to you. If you are going directly to a gastroscopy or colonoscopy, a nurse will run through some key information with you, provide further information to you in writing and give you clear instructions about preparing for the procedure. If the decision is for an appointment with me, a similar process will follow.

If you require surgery, then at the end of your consultation with me I will complete a booking form and my team makes contact with you to arrange a mutually suitable date for the surgery. They provide you with all the information that you will require for your admission and recovery. The hospital will be informed and they too will be in touch with you to undertake some due diligence and provide you with further information. My team will let you know how to get your insurer to authorise the surgery, if you hold insurance, or instead provide you with a written estimate of costs if you are self-funding the surgery. Some procedures are automatically covered by insurers like Southern Cross as I am an Affiliated Provider, but this will be clarified by my team. For ACC beneficiaries, we are required to submit an ARTP (Assessment Report and Treatment Plan) to them before we can begin the booking process. Once this ARTP has been given the green light by ACC, the booking process mentioned above can begin. Please note that this ARTP process can take several weeks for ACC to approve.