The cure for slow care

Re: Hospitals not sole surgery site;

Brian Rotenberg, Sept. 4 Brian Rotenberg and Edward McGowan have identified a simple formula: with constrained health care budgets, the only way to cut wait times for surgeries is to do them more quickly.

As a medical student at Western University, I have witnessed each knee replacement surgery being delayed 30 to 45 minutes because cleaning and preparing the operating room occurs too slowly. Instead of four surgeries a day, only three get completed, and the wait time balloons over time.

The driver of these delays is the overwhelming complexity in our hospitals.

It is well known that specialization results in faster, more effective processes, but our hospitals do not follow this principle.

Creating stand-alone ambulatory surgery centres could allow nurses and surgeons to concentrate fully on a single task: doing a surgery as safely and quickly as possible.

In doing so, we could all benefit from quicker access to life-improving surgeries. Robbie Sparrow, London, Ont