The Ontario government is hoping to reduce wait times for gastrointestinal endoscopies by funding 60,000 procedures at private community clinics.
A 10-week window to submit licence applications has been announced by the province with approvals scheduled for issue in early 2025. Endoscopies include various tests to view body organs, such as a colonoscopy for examining the colon.
“When it comes to wait times for surgeries and procedures, the status quo is not acceptable,” Jones said. “Increasing access to GI endoscopy procedures will help improve rapid access to diagnostic care for early disease detection when and where people need it.”
The Your Health plan focuses on increasing access to services in health care settings near the patients who need them, Jones said. In a statement on the Your Health website she noted that the province would look to other provinces and countries for inspiration in health-care reform but that Ontarians would “always access the health care they need with their OHIP card, never their credit card.”
Also part of the program was the government’s recent call for applications to boost the availability of MRI and CT scans by 100,000 province-wide. The statement said 49 new MRI machines have been installed in 42 Ontario hospitals thus far.
A third call will be launched this fall to expand access to orthopedic surgeries, the province said.
A similar program trialed in Saskatchewan that relied heavily on private clinics is a potential model to address the ongoing issue of long health-care wait times in Canada, according to one study.
The SSI program worked by compiling referrals province-wide to more efficiently pair patients with available specialists as well as by using private clinics to carry out publicly funded procedures. Over the five-year period the SSI was in place, the average medical wait time from when a patient was referred by their family physician to a specialist to when the treatment was completed fell by 47 percent to 14.2 weeks.