SASKATOON – In just four years, Saskatchewan has gone from having the worst surgical wait times in the country at 29 weeks to the shortest at 13.6 weeks, according to a new report by the Fraser Institute.
“It just shows that when you set a priority, you set goals, when you put resources behind those goals you can achieve pretty amazing things,” Saskatchewan Health Minister Dustin Duncan said on Monday.
“We’ve come a long ways but we’re going to keep working at this.”
According to Duncan, the province’s work on wait times has piqued the interest of other parts of the country since the average wait time for most Canadians is more than four months for medically necessary procedures.
“Across Canada, the story really is that wait times have stabilized or stagnated but they’ve done so at a very, very high level,” said Bacchus Barua, senior economist for the Fraser Institute.
“We measured that it takes about 18 weeks to get treatment after getting a referral from a general practitioner. Just to provide some context that wait is almost twice as long as it was in 1993.”
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The Atlantic provinces faced the longest median wait times with patients in Prince Edward Island often waiting 43 weeks for procedures, although the number of survey responses from these regions were lower than other provinces.
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Nonethess, Barua says the major concern with lengthy wait times is the potential for serious complications for some patients, even the risk of death.
The official for the Vancouver-based think tank also noted that the wait times featured in the report titled Waiting Your Turn are median numbers; some patients have their surgeries scheduled sooner or in some cases wait longer.
“When we look at different treatments the wait times are different, there are shorter waits times for things like radiation oncology for cancer and cardiovascular surgery and much, much longer waits times for orthopedic surgery and neurosurgery,” he said.
Specialist physicians across 12 specialties in 10 provinces were surveyed for the report.
The specialists polled include: plastic surgery, gynaecology, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, general surgery, neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, cardiovascular surgery, urology, internal medicine, radiation oncology and medical oncology.
The report also notes that the overall response rate of those surveyed was 21 per cent and across the 10 provinces, an estimated total number of procedures that Canadians are waiting for in 2015 is 894,449.
Data was collected Jan. 12 and April 27 which is a bit misleading, according to the provincial opposition, since the government made surgical budget cuts in March.
“What we’ve seen since March is a 73 per cent increase in those waiting longer than three months for surgeries,” said Saskatchewan NDP health critic Danielle Chartier.
In March, less than 1,700 patients waited for more than a three-month timeframe for surgery in both major cities. In September, that number rose to 2,800 patients waiting for more than 12 weeks for surgery, something the health minister addressed late last month.
At that time, Duncan said he wasn’t concerned by those figures since most patients don’t wait much longer than three months and in 99 per cent of cases the patient waited between three to six months for surgery.
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