Riverview resident Cindy Gaudet is one of 629 New Brunswickers waiting for a knee or hip replacement.
Gaudet already waited a year and a half for one knee surgery and is still recovering as she awaits surgery on her second knee.
“My surgeon said that it’s quite severe, that it would be ideal to get that done right away. However, there is currently at least a year wait for me to get that done,” she said Friday.
Gaudet is on leave from her teaching job is hoping to feel well enough to return to work for the 2022-2023 school year.
“My concern is I need to go back to work,” she said.
“Do I trust my other knee? Because I’m going down the stairs and my new knee is doing a fantastic job, but my old knee decides that it doesn’t want to cooperate and it collapses on me. I need my strength and I need my mobility to do a good job at work.”
New Brunswick is falling behind the national six-month benchmark wait time for hip and knee replacement surgeries.
In a statement, the Department of Health told Global News that “an enhanced effort to reduce the list of those waiting over a year for hip and knee joint replacement surgeries started in 2020.” However, surgery cancellations related to the COVID-19 pandemic have created a significant backlog.
The province recently started publicly posting wait times by surgeon in a bid to enhance transparency.
Dr. Mark MacMillan, president of the New Brunswick Medical Society, said that while he supports providing more clarity to the general public about wait times, surgeons have little control over the situation.
“(Surgeons) require (regional health authority) support for their operating time. They need the space and the room to do their procedures,” he said on Friday.
“So for example, I’m a gastroenterologist. I do colonoscopies. I could see 2,000 or 3,000 people but I don’t have the space to put 2,000 or 3,000 people through a procedure so my waitlist will grow. That’s just simply a numbers issue. The more people I see is great but I also need the resources on the other end to actually complete the procedures and have the surgeries done on time.”
He said longer surgery wait times are a nationwide problem, caused by many factors like an aging population and healthcare worker staffing shortages.
“There’s a 95 per cent vacancy rate increase across healthcare positions in Canada. That has never been seen before,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health told Global News that more details on initiatives to address surgery wait times would come “later this summer.
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