MDS call for non-profit surgical centres

TORONTO • Ontario doctors pushed lawmakers this week to create specialized non-profit clinics to tackle a massive surgical backlog that worsened during the pandemic.

The Ontario Medical Association said it would like to see “integrated ambulatory centres” affiliated with hospitals across the province to deal with the backlog that has grown to more than one million procedures.

“The stand-alone series of surgical centres are designed specifically to focus on one type of surgery at a time so that we could improve efficiency, more patients would get their procedures done, and it would be an improved experience for the healthcare delivery team,” the association’s president, Dr. Rose Zacharias, said in an interview.

The centres would focus on specific elective surgeries, such as replacing knees and hips, she said. They would operate within Ontario’s publicly funded health-care system and would not contribute to a two-tier system, the medical association said.

Similar facilities in other regions have shown there are lower complication rates and fewer infections compared to procedures done in a standard operating room at a hospital, Zacharias said. Such centres exist in British Columbia and Alberta, and there are a few in Ontario as well, she said.

“We think they can be scaled up,” Zacharias said. “We think they can capture the surgeries that are waiting to be done.”

More than 100 doctors descended upon the legislature on Monday to suggest the surgical centres as one way to ease pressures on an overburdened health system.

Emergency departments temporarily closed for hours or days at a time in the summer and into the fall while children’s hospitals have been cancelling surgeries to deal with a massive influx of patients with respiratory illnesses. Elective surgeries, despite their name, remain important, she said.

“If they are not done, they render a patient to loss of function, increased mental health distress and burden and the whole ripple effect of not getting a knee replacement, for example,” Zacharias said.

There is a significant doctor and nurse shortage across Ontario, which is projected to get worse.

The centres would be staffed by hospital doctors and nurses who could use their time more efficiently, Zacharias said.

“Right now there are doctors and nurses that perform a variety of surgical procedures inside one operating room in a hospital and if we were to designate another surgical space for just knee replacements, for example, the docs and the nurses that would’ve otherwise maybe waited for a few hours to get that O.R. set up to do the surgery, would come to this space,” Zacharias said.

“And because it’s a full day of knee replacements, it takes minutes to go from case to case.”