The Fraser Institute’s survey of specialist physicians has been carried out every year since 1993, and this year’s median wait time is the highest recorded in that time span: 30 weeks between referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment. This is up from 27.7 weeks last year, and an increase of 222 percent since 1993—when the median wait time was just 9.3 weeks.
The report calculates that Canadians are waiting for a total of 1,543,994 medical procedures, and estimates that 3.7 percent of the population is currently on a waiting list for a procedure. Diagnostics are also facing significant backlogs, with expected wait times of 16.2 weeks for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, 8.1 weeks for a computed tomography (CT) scan, and 5.2 weeks for an ultrasound.
Lengthy health-care waitlists are not a mere inconvenience. In addition to contributing to emotional turmoil and stress for patients and their families, long wait times may be contributing to increased mortality.
While the health-care system cannot be blamed in all cases where a patient dies on a waiting list, some of the deaths recorded in this study occurred after patients waited longer than the recommended time for potentially life-saving procedures. For instance, 101 patients died while waiting for heart surgery in Ontario—36 of them after waiting longer than the maximum recommended wait time.
The report also points out that some patients die while on unreasonably long waitlists for non-lifesaving but nevertheless very important medical services like hip replacements or cataract operations—services which could have boosted their quality of life.
Fixing Canada’s health-care system requires vigorous public discussion and debate. A major impediment to this is a lack of transparency. Precise breakdowns of wait times and waitlist deaths are not readily available to the public.
There are limitations to the methodology of the Fraser Institute’s annual report—the authors of this year’s report write that their estimates “may be biased downward, understating actual wait times.” The report by SecondStreet.org relied on freedom of information (FOI) requests made to government health-care bodies; some of these bodies explained that “the cause for cancelling a procedure isn’t always tracked for all procedures and may not be recorded by all staff.”
The public shouldn’t have to rely on surveys and FOI requests by think tanks for data on how our health-care system works (or doesn’t work). More transparency on this issue would make it easier for the public to hold government accountable.
Public discussion is also limited by taboos, most notably surrounding the link between population growth and Canada’s overburdened healthcare system. Most health-care analyses contain numerous solid policy suggestions, but often only a brief throwaway sentence explaining that these reforms are needed to match Canada’s healthcare capacity with our growing population.
My wish for the New Year is for a vigorous debate on health care, laser focused on concrete and actionable reforms. Canadians deserve so much better from a system funded by taxpayers and crucial to the physical and mental well-being of citizens.
