It’s unacceptable that British Columbians are waiting far too long for important medical procedures such as hip and knee replacements. Vancouver Islanders, in particular, facesome of the longest waits in the country, according to a report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Across B.C., patients wait longer than they do in every other province.
The benchmark is that surgery should happen within six months. Across Canada, 79 per cent of patients received hip replacements in that time, and 73 per cent received knee-replacement surgery.
On Vancouver Island, only 45 per cent of patients receive hip-replacement surgery within that time, while 29 per cent got knee replacements within six months.
More troubling, the situation is getting much worse. In 2012, 80 per cent of British Columbians received surgery within the six-month benchmark; in 2016, only 61 per cent of cases met the standard. In 2012, 74 per cent of knee replacements were done within six months; last year, it was 47 per cent.
It’s a serious failure by the government. British Columbians pay for health care, as do all Canadians, but are receiving a far lower standard of care in areas that can be readily measured.
B.C. has the third-poorest record in meeting the wait time for cataract surgery. And while 91 per cent of B.C. patients received radiation therapy within the 28-day standard, that is the worst performance among provinces. The national average is 97 per cent.
These kinds of waits are tremendously damaging. People waiting for a knee replacements can suffer pain and lose the ability to work or care for family, while forced inactivity leads to other health problems.
That’s why WorkSafe B.C. pays for private knee-replacement surgery for people injured on the job. The costs of delaying treatment are too great.
But when it comes to ordinary British Columbians, the government has chosen to increase wait times and shift the resulting costs onto British Columbians, instead of providing the needed number of surgeries.
The government has three roles here: Assess the demand, ensure the most efficient methods are being used and provide the funding. (Ensuring the most efficient delivery is important. That’s why it is valuable for Island Health to contract out some procedures to for-profit businesses such as the new View Royal Surgical Centre, providing a chance to assess the cost-effectiveness and outcomes of its own processes.)
And the current government has failed in its basic responsibility to deliver adequate health care to citizens.
The failure could reflect priorities — perhaps the government has concluded other spending is more important than meeting health-care standards — or competence.
But the cause doesn’t matter.
What matters is that British Columbians are, based on key measures, receiving substandard health care and waiting longer for needed surgery than patients in any other province. And that the situation has, since 2012, worsened.
The numbers speak for themselves. Now the election candidates must defend the status quo, or provide a credible plan to improve a grim situation.
