Wait times for MRI diagnostic scans on Vancouver Island have been cut in half, but are still more than three times the recommended benchmark.
Ninety per cent of Vancouver Islanders waiting for an magnetic resonance imaging scan are waiting 296 days — down from 612 days in September 2015.
“It has dropped by more than 50 per cent,” said Scott McCarten, Island Health’s new director of medical imaging. “I think it’s a success story. We’ve been able to increase access to MRIs across the Island, and we will be doing more so we expect that rate to drop even more as we do more scans.”
Despite the improvement, the wait time for a routine MRI is still more than three times the recommended benchmark of 90 days.
Premier Christy Clark and Health Minister Terry Lake have both acknowledged that people are waiting too long for the medical scans, which are used to examine everything from brain tumours to joint problems.
In November 2015, the province unveiled a four-year plan to boost the number of MRIs by 65,000 a year at a cost of up to $20 million annually by year four.
Island Health projects it will have received $3.8 million and will be performing about 41,730 MRI scans a year by 2019.
B.C. NDP health critic Judy Darcy has called the B.C. Liberal government’s approach to decreasing wait times for diagnostic tests “crisis management.”
In January, Island Health paid two private clinics almost $1 million to perform 1,800 MRI scans — paying almost twice the per-scan price it incurs to perform the same tests in a bid to reduce wait times.
In the end, 2,346 scans were performed by Vancouver Island MRI in Comox and Nanaimo MRI.
Island Health is projecting it will complete 39,000 MRIs this year. By comparison, there were 28,064 MRIs performed in 2014-15 and 31,908 in 2015-16.
“We’re ahead of our target for the first half the the year,” McCarten said.
The number of people on the Island wait-list is now 7,362, down from 11,252 in January and 9,476 in April.
The health authority has also been able to increase the number of medical radiation technologists through training, retention and recruitment.
“We’ve been meeting or exceeding our targets … and we’ve had no problem recruiting technologists,” McCarten said. A few vacancies remain, but most positions have been filled, he said.
