While wait times for crucial medical procedures are improving across Canada, patients still can't get a good picture on how long they can expect to wait for treatment, concludes a new report.
The Wait Time Alliance released its fourth annual report card Thursday that shows some progress in cutting wait times in five clinical areas deemed priorities by governments:
- joint replacement (hip and knee)
- sight restoration (cataract surgery)
- heart (coronary artery bypass graft)
- diagnostic imaging (MRI and CT)
- cancer care (radiation therapy)
But they say too much of the wait-times picture remains shrouded in mystery.
"People can go online and track the progress of a package they shipped from one end of the country to another, yet in many parts of Canada patients still cannot find out how long they can expect to wait for critical medical treatments and procedures," said WTA co-chair Dr. Lorne Bellan.
"We need to do a better job of tracking and reporting on the full wait that patients experience to access necessary medical care."
The WTA found slight improvements over the previous year in wait times for the five priority areas. But they say wait-time information is still neither easily accessible nor updated frequently enough in some provinces.
One province -- Newfoundland and Labrador -- still does not have a webpage dedicated to wait-times reporting. Yet other provinces -- notably Ontario, Manitoba and New Brunswick -- have significantly improved the scope and frequency of their data reporting, the WTA found.
The WTA found many improvements in the percentage of patients being treated within government wait time benchmarks. Ontario, Manitoba and B.C. were found to be strong performers on improving wait times, while Atlantic Canada lags behind.
But once again they point out that these benchmarks are really maximum acceptable wait-time targets, not desired wait-time targets.
The WTA says governments have still failed to apply wait-time targets to a lot of clinical services. So they decided to do their own survey with the help of Ipsos-Reid and to look at the example set by the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain.
"In England, the maximum allowable target time set by the National Health Service for referral by family doctor to the day of treatment is 18 weeks," said Bellan. "Our study shows that for many medical specialties in Canada that we examined, we don't even come close to that."
In almost every area the WTA examined, the majority of patients waited longer than 18 weeks for treatments. For example, a full 83 per cent of patients waiting for knee replacement surgery wait more than 18 weeks, while 82 per cent of patients wait that long for help with urinary incontinence.
The report is entitled Unfinished Business to highlight that more work remains to be done to cut wait times. Most notably, it says governments have still failed to apply wait-time targets to a broader array of clinical services, such as MRI and CT scan wait times.
This year, the Report Card also includes data on the wait for more procedures under the initial five priority areas, as well as for procedures in new specialties: psychiatry, obstetrics/gynecology, gastroenterology, plastic surgery, anesthesiology and emergency care.
