Audit Finds Long Waits for Breast Exams

The audit examined waiting times at nine health care facilities in the 2009 fiscal year and found that the worst were at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, where women had to wait 148 calendar days for routine screening mammograms and 50 working days for diagnostic mammograms, when cancer is suspected.

John C. Liu, the city comptroller, said in a statement accompanying the audit that the long waiting times “placed women in jeopardy” and violated the city’s policies, which recommend waits of no more than two weeks for routine screening.

He said women who had to wait long times for appointments were more likely to miss them.

Ana Marengo, a spokeswoman for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the public health system, said that the comptroller’s data was outdated and that high-risk patients at its hospitals received mammograms within 24 to 72 hours.

“If there is a lump, if there is a family history, if there is a high-risk individual that had cancer before, all those are considered urgent,” and the patient would be seen within 72 hours, Ms. Marengo said. She conceded that “two years ago, the wait time was longer,” and that even now, in cases in which the risk of cancer was considered lower, the wait could still be longer.

At Elmhurst, she said, the wait as of December 2010 was 20 days for screening and 23 days for a general diagnostic test, as opposed to an urgent one.

At Queens Hospital Center, the wait for a screening test was 56 days in December, Ms. Marengo said. “It’s due to volume and higher demand,” she said. “We only have a certain amount of resources.”

The audit found that the longest waits for diagnostic tests were at Bellevue Hospital Center, with 17 working days; Gouverneur Healthcare Services, with 20; Kings County Hospital Center, with 21; Woodhull Medical Center, with 28; and Elmhurst, with 50.

For screening tests, the longest waits were 41 calendar days at Woodhull in Brooklyn, 49 days at Queens, and 148 days at Elmhurst.

Elmhurst Hospital conducted the most mammograms, 11,425, and Queens was second, with 10,544, the comptroller said.

Last year, public hospitals performed 100,000 mammograms systemwide, up from about 92,000 in 2009, Ms. Marengo said.