Canadian health care wait times need improvement, reports say

Manitobans waited 19.4 weeks in 2015 while across Canada patients waited an average of 18.3 weeks.

The Alliance, a coalition of medical specialists, is calling on elected provincial and federal leaders to help fashion a “new national vision for health care”, one that sets national benchmarks that go beyond the 2004 initiative that targeted five procedures: hip and knee replacements; cataract surgery; heart operations; diagnostic imaging; and cancer radiotherapy.

The key is to better understand the health policy experiences of other more successful universal health care systems around the developed world”, said Bacchus Barua, senior economist at the Fraser Institute’s Centre for Health Policy Studies and author of Waiting Your Turn: “Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2015 Report.

The main takeaway: 18.3 weeks is the median wait time.

The 2015 Wait Time Alliance Report Card found the wait for an MRI in Manitoba increased in 2015.

The Fraser Institute reached a similar conclusion by surveying almost 24-hundred medical specialists nationwide to determine the length of time between when a patient is referred to them and when they receive treatment. The group says there’s been some improvement in wait times when it comes to cardiac and radiation treatments, but many others remain unacceptably high. In Saskatchewan and Ontario, both surveys agree.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic provinces face the longest median wait times: Prince Edward Island (43.1 weeks) followed closely by New Brunswick (42.8 weeks) and Newfoundland and Labrador (42.7 weeks).

He says wait times are increasing because there hasn’t been any action on them.

The message is clear: The system as a whole needs to be fixed, Alliance chair Chris Simpson said. These wait times for medically necessary treatment in Canada are not simply minor inconveniences.

The annual report card provides a snapshot of wait times across a range of measures gathered from provincially available information this summer.

Saskatchewan’s wait times have been halved since only 2011, from 29 weeks to 13.6 weeks.