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.
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At the national level, it found the median wait time from referral to treatment was 18.3 weeks, nearly the same as the 18.2 weeks recorded in 2014, but nearly double the 9.3 weeks recorded in 1993 when the survey began. That’s up slightly from 18.2 weeks a year ago. The report says the number of survey responses in Atlantic Canada were lower than other provinces, which may result in reported median wait times being higher or lower than those actually experienced.
In cancer care, the grade is D for the wait time between diagnosis and treatment.
In terms of specific specialties, patients in need of orthopaedic surgery wait the longest across Canada, at 35.7 weeks, while people in need of radiation oncology wait about a month.
How did Quebec do?
After ballooning for several decades, healthcare wait times in Canada have started to stabilize, but they’ve stabilized at a very high place.
A new report by the Wait Time Alliance – an organization made up of groups representing specialists – suggests that there hasn’t been much year-over-year change to wait times in Canada.
No matter what figures are being presented, however, Simpson said the message is clear – the system as a whole needs to be fixed.
The Fraser Institute report tallies up the median wait times province by province.
The province gets an A+ for the 26-week average wait time for hip replacements, and the 16-week wait for cataract surgery.
– neurosurgery (surgery performed on the nervous system): 27.6 weeks.
The Fraser Institute also released a report which found Manitoba fell below the Canadian average when it comes to wait times between getting a referral from a general practitioner and getting treatment.
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On a provincial basis, Saskatchewan now has the shortest waits in the country at 13.6 weeks, a dramatic turnaround from 2011 when it was among the country’s longest wait times (29.0 weeks).
