Waits get longer for hip, knee, cataract surgery

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This article was published 27/03/2019 (2058 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Most Manitobans who needed a hip or knee replaced or cataract surgery did not get it within the recommended wait time, a new study by the Canadian Institute for Health Information says.

Those patients also experienced longer wait times for those procedures in 2018, compared with 2016, according to the report.

The independent, not-for-profit organization found that 49 per cent of Manitobans received a hip replacement within the recommended wait time of six months in 2018, compared with 66 per cent of residents in 2016. In all of Canada, the 2018 statistic was 75 per cent.

For knee replacements, 37 per cent of Manitobans received the surgery within the recommended six months, compared with 34 per cent in 2016. The Canadian average for getting a new knee within the recommended time was 69 per cent.

The percentage of patients who received cataract surgery within the recommended 16 weeks was 29 per cent, compared to 34 per cent two years earlier. In all of Canada, the 2018 statistic was 70 per cent.

NDP Leader Wab Kinew blamed provincial government cost-cutting.

“Fewer Manitobans are having the surgery they need in time, meaning they are waiting for months in pain and discomfort,” he said Wednesday in a prepared statement. “This is what happens when the government only focuses on cutting costs and ignores the needs of patients.”

The former NDP government had been making steady progress on improving access to hip, knee and cataract surgeries within the recommended wait times, Kinew said. In 2014, 71 per cent of Manitobans needing hip replacements got surgery within the recommended time — compared with 49 per cent in 2018.

The Tories were elected to power in 2016.

Health Minister Cameron Friesen fired back, saying more people need those procedures now, and his government has expanded the diagnostic testing needed to get them.

“The issue of volume must be taken into account,” Friesen said.

“We know we have an aging population,” he said in a teleconference Wednesday from his constituency office in Morden. The 2018 CIHI findings won’t show the results of some big investments in cataract and hip and knee replacement surgeries announced by his government last year, he said.

More than $5.3 million was announced in the fall to increase the number of hip and knee replacement surgeries performed in 2019 by at least 1,000 — a nearly 25 per cent uptick from last year, Friesen said.

An additional 2,000 cataract surgeries are being performed in 2019 as part of that funding, which Friesen’s office says is a 16 per cent increase from 2018.

Reducing wait times is just one of the “historical challenges” the NDP threw more money at but didn’t solve, the former finance minister said. “These are long-standing issues.”

Manitoba has been among the top spenders on health-care dollars invested per person, Friesen said.

“It’s about efficiencies,” he said, pointing to the province’s wait times reduction task force, “then plowing the savings back into the system.

“We know these have been historical challenges that with more money alone we’re unable to solve. We have to transform our health-care system to do a better job.”

That will put Manitoba in a better position in CIHI’s 2019 report, he predicted.

“As we continue to transition to a new system that’s more efficient… we will rise in the rankings.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca