Wait times for joint replacement rising

Only 67 per cent of patients got surgery on time

Already high waits for joint replacement surgery are on the rise in the Hamilton area, reveals a national report.

Only 67 per cent of patients got a hip or knee replacement within the province’s maximum wait target of 182 days in 2017 in the Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant Local Health Integration Network (LHIN), which also includes Burlington.

To compare, roughly 85 per cent of area patients got their joint replacement within the benchmark in 2015, found the Canadian Institute for Health Information’s (CIHI) wait time data released Thursday.

“This is despite an increase in the number of procedures that has been done in Hamilton and Niagara,” said Jennifer D’Silva, manager of emerging issues at

CIHI. “People are still waiting longer.”

The waits are much worse in this area than the provincial average of 83 per cent of patients getting their hip replacement within the six-month time frame and 78 per cent for knee replacement.

The goal is for 90 per cent of patients to get their surgery within the recommended time.

“We’re not meeting that target,” said D’Silva.

The report also shows waits here are rising at a much faster rate than the provincial average.

Ontario saw a decrease of four percentage points in the number of hip replacements done on time from 2015 to 2017. In this LHIN, the drop was 18 percentage points. For knees, the provincial dip was eight percentage points from 2015 to 2017, while it was 17 here.

“We’ve seen our wait times increase over the last few years,” said Anne Marie MacDonald, director of surgery at St. Joseph’s Healthcare. “It’s something we don’t feel good about, but the wait times are what they are.”

On April 1, the LHIN started sending patients to the surgeon in their city with the shortest wait to combat the growing problem that Canada’s first ministers set out to improve in 2004.

The central referral system means family doctors no longer choose the specialist, which can sometimes put too big of a burden on one physician. Patients who want a specific doctor for their joint replacements can still choose to wait longer if they wish.

“The hope is that will even out the playing field,” said MacDonald. “And give us a true appreciation of what wait times are.”

Ontario’s online listing of wait times shows Hamilton patients have no trouble seeing the specialist for the first time, but the bottleneck occurs once the decision has been made to have surgery.

In February, all patients at Hamilton Health Sciences and roughly 90 per cent of patients at St. Joseph’s were seen by their surgeons within 68 days of referral for a joint replacement as recommended. But that number dropped to between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of patients getting their actual surgery done on time.