Medical wait times rising again in Quebec: study

But province is still second-lowest with average 16 weeks to treatment

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in extra spending on Quebec’s health-care system in the past two years, wait times are creeping back up in the province, a new national survey has found.

The median wait time to be examined by a general practitioner, combined with the wait for treatment by a medical specialist, climbed to 16.3 weeks in Quebec, up from 15.8 last year, according to the annual survey by the Fraser Institute. Still, the wait was the second-lowest in the country, after Ontario, which reported a median wait of 16 weeks.

The uptick in Quebec follows a sharp drop in the median wait last year from 2017, when the figure reported was 20.6 weeks.

“Following significant improvements last year, wait times for medically necessary treatments in Quebec appear to be increasing again,” said Bacchus Barua, associate director of health policy studies at the Fraser Institute and co-author of the survey.

The Coalition Avenir Québec government swept into power in October 2018 promising to fix the province’s health-care system. Health Minister Danielle McCann has noted that the CAQ government has spent $650 million more on health care to reduce surgical backlogs and improve access to front-line care.

At the same time, however, Quebec’s population continues to age, straining the health system as never before.

Barua suggested that although increased health spending might cut wait times in the short term, the trend over time has been longer waits in Quebec and across Canada. For example, the median wait time in 1993 was 7.3 weeks in Quebec — less than half of what it is today.

“Overall, what we found across every province for the over 30 years that we’ve been doing this is that even when provinces make progress, it’s usually only temporary,” Barua explained.

“Quite often you’ll see an injection of money, you’ll see a slight tweak in policy, or you’ll see an efficiency introduced somewhere into the hospital system and it does help the wait times a little bit, but over time they start to creep back up to the high wait times that we currently see because of the policies that we have in place.”

A separate study this year by the Canadian Institute for Health Information observed a similar trend in wait times for four procedures in Quebec: hip and knee replacements, cataract removal and bypass surgery. In 2014, 84 per cent of Quebecers in need of a hip replacement got it done within the medically acceptable delay of 182 days. By 2018, that percentage dipped to 80 per cent.

In 2014, 99 per cent of cancer patients in need of radiotherapy underwent the procedure within 28 days, compared to a rate of 97 per cent last year.

“Long waits for medical treatment aren’t a trivial matter — they can increase suffering for patients, decrease quality of life, and in the worst cases, lead to disability or death,” said Fraser Institute senior fellow Yanick Labrie.

Despite the overall increase in Quebec’s wait times, there has been some progress. The Fraser survey found the median wait time for an ultrasound in Quebec dropped to five weeks this year compared with eight weeks for each of the past two years. Quebec also reported the shortest wait of all provinces to see a specialist, at 7.2 weeks

Barua urged Quebec to follow the lead of some European countries with universal health care that partner with the private sector. Quebec is already experimenting with such partnerships, with mixed results. In May, McCann extended by a year a pilot project involving three private surgical clinics performing day surgeries under medicare.

The Fraser Institute surveyed a total of 1,844 physicians across the country, including 220 in Quebec.

Long waits for medical treatment aren’t a trivial matter. YANICK LABRIE