Patient faces unexpected long wait for surgery

REGINA — At a time when the province is focusing on reducing surgical wait times to three months, a Regina man is upset he must wait at least a year before he can get surgery.

Harley Ast was dumbfounded when the surgical care co-ordinator with the Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region (RQHR) called him on Jan. 23 and told him not to expect surgery for 12 to 14 months.

That contradicted the estimated six-month wait Regina urologist, Dr. Edward Tse, gave Ast in early November.

“How do you go from six months to 12 to 14 months?” Ast asked Tuesday.

“I’ve never head of that happening,” said the 72-yearold, who has had multiple operations in Regina’s hospitals.

The scheduling office sends monthly lists with approximate wait times to surgeons’ offices, but physicians are not always aware of their own wait times, said Sandy Euteneier, the RQHR’s executive director of surgical services.

She noted there is quite an imbalance in waits between urology specialists as well as other surgical services.

Cancer patients are given priority on wait lists while others, like Ast, can see waits vary depending on how many cancer cases their surgeon is seeing.

“In certain services, we are phoning and saying, ‘You can go from this doctor’s list to this other doctor’s list, who can do you sooner,’ ” Euteneier said. “Having said that, they may not all do certain procedures.”

Ast wasn’t told he has the option to go elsewhere for surgery.

“If there’s a person as good as Dr. Tse for this specific operation, I would go to Saskatoon,” he said. “It’s something I really need right now.”

According to the latest data on the Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative website, 346 urology operations were performed in the RQHR between September and November and 298 patients were waiting for surgery. Of those, 5.3 per cent had waited longer than 12 months.

In Saskatoon, 551 urology surgeries were performed in the same time frame, and 354 patients were waiting. All surgeries were done within 12 months in Saskatoon, which has seven urologists compared to Regina’s three.

“We have improved our wait times, but have we completely eliminated them? Absolutely not,” Euteneier said. “We’re working very hard on trying to get our backlog down so that we can achieve the targets that the province has set out for us, both for cancer-related and regular surgeries.”

When Ast called the surgical care co-ordinator on Jan. 20 to find out where he was on the wait list, a recorded message told him that due to the high volume of calls he should not expect an answer for at least one to three days. When Ast didn’t hear back on the third day, he called again and left another message.

On Jan. 24, the region called Ast and informed him of the lengthy wait.

The RQHR used to have two people answering surgical wait time calls, but when waits started to improve, the number of calls decreased by more than 50 per cent from a year ago and one position was eliminated.

Around Christmas, the person answering surgical inquiries had time off and was not replaced for two weeks. When she returned, there was a backlog of calls.

“It’s totally unacceptable that we have a wait line that someone is not manning,” Euteneier said.

That won’t happen again, she added.

About 600 people call the RQHR’s surgical care co-ordinator monthly to check their surgery dates.