The province has reached a new surgical milestone, having completed a record number of procedures in a year, and nearly all those postponed during the pandemic, according to Health Minister Adrian Dix.
Between 2022 and the end of March, staff performed 350,886 surgeries across the province, an increase of four per cent from the same timeframe between 2019 and 2020.
Health authorities also expanded their collective operating hours by five per cent — a total of 31,219 extra hours — and helped shrink B.C.’s overall surgical waitlist by 4.9 per cent.
“From a national perspective, in important surgical categories, we’ve gone from near the bottom to at the very top,” Dix said in a Thursday news conference.
“It’s a credit to everyone involved in delivering surgeries, to the patients and their loved ones who help them prepare for and recover from their surgeries, and to all of us who followed guidance to slow the spread.”
Between 2021 and 2022, more than 337,000 procedures were completed — a record at the time.
Dix said the province has almost caught up on nearly 100 per cent of all surgeries postponed due to COVID-19, extreme weather and staffing shortages.
Less than 0.5 per cent of surgeries postponed in the first to fifth waves of COVID-19, and whose patients still want those procedures done, remain outstanding on the province’s to-do list.
“Promise was made, promise was kept,” Dix said. “It was fulfilled not simply by the government but it as fulfilled by our surgeons, our nurses, our health sciences professionals and our health-care workers.”
According to the Ministry of Health, the province has added 41 new initiatives to increase operating room capacity since last April. Health authorities have also trained an additional 334 surgical specialty nurses.
Since the pandemic began in 2020, 209 surgeons, 134 anesthesiologists, 322 perioperative nurses, seven general physician anesthetists, and 76 medical device reprocessing technicians have been added to the province’s overall health-care staff roster.
The province continues, however, to suffer broadly from a shortage of nurses and family physicians, with nearly 1 million British Columbians without a family doctor as of last September.
Across B.C., and in rural areas especially, emergency department closures are not uncommon due to a shortage in available staff.