Burnaby Hospital gets new role in bid to ease joint surgery waits
The province will turn Burnaby Hospital into a model centre for hip and knee replacement surgery in the Fraser Health Authority as its fourth stop in rolling out a strategy to increase surgeries and reduce waiting lists for the procedures.
Health Minister Adrian Dix last month committed an additional $75 million for the upcoming year to increase the number of hip and knee replacements by 4,000 across the province, then $100 million per year in 2019.
On Sunday, Dix said Fraser Health will get an additional 836 knee-and-hip-replacement surgeries out of that initiative in the government’s 2018-19 fiscal year, based on the streamlined surgery program established at Burnaby Hospital.
The program will be centred in Burnaby, but Dix said other hospitals in the health region will adopt its procedures to increase the number of surgeries across the region. The health region includes 12 hospitals from Burnaby to Hope.
The hope is that the region will see 4,331 joint-replacement-surgeries performed in 2018-19 versus 3,336 for the fiscal year that ended March 31.
And the Fraser Health program is similar to surgery programs Dix has already unveiled for the Island Health Authority on Vancouver Island, Vancouver Coastal Health and the Northern Health Authority with services centred in at Prince George.
“All these are public-system solutions to public-system waiting times,” Dix said.
B.C.’s performance on providing hip and knee replacements has deteriorated in recent years.
In 2017, only 62 per cent of British Columbians in need of hip replacements and 46 per cent of those in need of knee replacements received the procedures within the recommended maximum wait of six months, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
That is slightly worse than 2015 when 61 per cent of B.C. hip-replacement and 47 per cent of knee-replacement patients received the procedures within the recommended six months.
However, the increase doesn’t necessarily clear up waiting lists in the Fraser Health Authority, which at the start of 2018 Dix said stood at 556 for hip replacements and 1,898 for knee replacements.
Dix said the provincewide efforts will involve permanent funding focused on ongoing efforts to reduce waiting times for hip and knee replacements.
“Part of the problems we’ve had with waiting lists in the past is the tendency, especially in election years, to proceed with one-time funding,” Dix said. “We gear up to raise the number of surgeries, then drop down again.”
And it may take more time to reduce waiting lists for other procedures.
Dix said that after the province works out how to keep up demand for joint replacements, “we will then proceed to reduce other waiting times for necessary surgery.”
As part of Sunday’s announcement, Dix said Fraser Health will get increased funding to boost MRI tests by 14 per cent to 63,000 in 2018-19 as well.
Doctors, however, are still juggling cases so they don’t wind up overwhelming the system, despite new money being poured into the system, according to testimony given to the B.C. Supreme Court challenge of the Medicare Protection Act.