Canada’s patient wait times among longest: report
TORONTO — It’s a common complaint — Canadians needing medical attention having to cool their heels in a hospital emergency room for hours on end before being seen by a doctor or another health-care practitioner.
Well, it turns out that compared with other industrialized countries, Canada has the highest proportion of patients reporting excessively long waits in an emergency department, a report released Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information shows.
The report, part of a survey of residents in 11 countries sponsored by the U.S.-based Commonwealth Fund, shows 29 per cent of Canadians had to wait four hours or longer before being seen by a practitioner during their most recent emergency department visit.
That’s almost three times the international average of 11 per cent of patients who had to wait that long. Patients in France, Germany and the Netherlands fared the best, with one to four per cent reporting a four-hourplus wait time.
Canada also topped the list for having the highest proportion of patients with long delays to see specialists, with 56 per cent waiting longer than four weeks, compared with the international average of 36 per cent, CIHI said.
In Switzerland, the proportion of patients who waited that long was 22 per cent; in the U.S., it was 24 per cent.
“In seven out of eight measures of timely access to care, Canada was significantly below the international average,” Christina Lawand, a senior researcher at CIHI, said from Ottawa.
“I think timely access to care has been a challenge for a while that we’ve noted from these surveys and from patient experience more generally in Canada,” she said.
“We’re not really seeing improvements over the past 10 years in timely access to care from a patient’s perspective, particularly when we look at timely access to family doctors or primary-care doctors or to specialists and for emergency department wait times.”
The results were based on interviews with 4,200 Canadian adults aged 18 and older, conducted between March and May last year.
Surveys that posed the same questions were undertaken in 10 other developed countries, including the United States, Britain, Australia and Sweden.
Digging further into the data, Lawand said the surveys show that Canadians tend to go to the emergency department more than their peers in other counties, “and often they tell us it’s for a problem that could have been treated by their regular doctor.”
“So all of these data help to shed light on the bigger picture, which is what is it in our system that may not be working so well and where could we concentrate or focus improvements?”