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OVERALL WAIT TIMES RISE IN ALBERTA
Most people know the wait for hip or knee surgery can be long — and painful — but what they may not know is that orthopedic surgeons and operating suites are sitting idle part of every day.
Provincial governments across Canada shut down some of their hospital operating rooms each afternoon to slow the cash drain on over-burdened public health-care budgets, says Dr. Donovan Kreutzer, with the Provital Health and Wellness private clinic.
“Many people leave the country for private surgical services,” Kreutzer says. He says the queue for orthopedic surgeries has become so long that a new company called Gateway Health Solutions, unaffiliated with Provital, has sprung up to offer concierge services, connecting Calgary surgeons and patients with private surgical clinics in British Columbia.
The latest data show that the Canadawide median wait time for orthopedic surgery reached 38 weeks, about nine months, according to the annual Waiting Your Turn report by the Fraser Institute. On average, it takes 15.6 weeks to see an orthopedic specialist and another 22.5 weeks to have a procedure booked into an operating room.
Yet, the Fraser Institute says the wait for orthopedic surgeries is no longer the worst in the system. The wait for neurosurgeries increased a startling 19.3 weeks during 2016 to a total of 46.9 weeks. Fraser has called the systematic delay of treatment a form of “health-care rationing.”
The good news is that cancer treatment continues to get flat-out, priority care across Canada. Radiation oncology shows a wait time of 4.1 weeks from GP visit to treatment, while medical oncology has a median wait time of 3.7 weeks.
The Fraser Institute says Albertans waited a week-and-a-half longer than in 2015 for medically necessary treatments of all kinds and three weeks longer than the national average in 2016. Across all measured specialties, the median wait for treatment in Alberta was 22.9 weeks, sixth-longest in the country.
Ontario recorded the shortest overall wait times at 15.6 weeks, Saskatchewan was second at 16.6 weeks and Quebec third at 18.9 weeks. New Brunswick showed the longest lineups, with waits stretching to 38.8 weeks. Nationally, the median wait time was 20 weeks in 2016, an increase from 18.3 weeks from the year before.
The Alberta government has said rising health-care costs and wait times are in large part the result of a rapidly growing population, driven by a decade of strong economic performance and high levels of in-migration. Alberta in-migration dropped sharply in the second half of 2016 as the province weathered the current economic downturn. But the province’s young population still has the nation’s highest birth rate and lowest death rate, combining to produce steady internal growth.
In the 2016-17 fiscal year, provincial health-care costs are budgeted at $20.36 billion, roughly 40 per cent of total spending. The next most expensive department is education at $7.91 billion, advanced education’s budget is $5.89 billion and human services is pegged to cost $4.39 billion.
Wait times for diagnostic technologies remained static in Alberta, at four weeks for a CT scan, 12 weeks for an MRI and two weeks for an ultrasound. But Albertans can console themselves with the knowledge that B.C. patients wait an average of 24 weeks for an MRI. In Ontario, wait times were three weeks for a CT, six weeks for an MRI and two weeks for an ultrasound. Alberta was about on par with the national average for CT and MRI scans, and wait times for ultrasounds were half the national wait of four weeks.
The Fraser Institute places the blame for growing wait times on Canada’s universal, government-funded health-care system, pointing out that some European universal systems, backed by a mix of government funding and private insurance, have achieved consistently shorter wait times and lesser burdens on government finances.
But defenders of the Canadian system say that allowing private insurance for essential services will create a two-tiered health-care system in which those who can afford private insurance get a higher level of care.