Surgery-wait needle beginning to move in right direction By: Tom Brodbeck Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Sep. 1, 2022

Opinion

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This article was published 31/08/2022 (846 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The decision to ramp up surgeries over the summer is paying off. Wait times for hip and knee surgeries in Manitoba showed their first sign of falling in July, according to new data released by Manitoba Health.

While the province still has a long way to go to bring wait times down to pre-pandemic levels, the needle is starting to move in the right direction. Median wait times for hip and knee surgeries dropped to 35 weeks in July, down from a high of 44 weeks in June. It was 25 weeks in 2019.

Hospitals normally reduce the number of surgical hours over the summer months to accommodate vacations for health-care staff. But with a massive surgical backlog created during the COVID-19 pandemic, many surgeons, nurses and other staff agreed to fill summer shifts to boost output in July and August.

Hospitals performed 477 hip and knee surgeries in July. The average number of procedures for July in the three years leading up to the pandemic (2017-2019) was 311. Health-care officials estimate Manitoba has to perform at least 6,000 hip and knee procedures annually to reduce the pandemic backlog (an average of 500 per month), a level the province is almost on track to reach for the fiscal year 2022-23. So far, Manitoba hospitals have performed an average of 471 hip and knee surgeries from April to July this year.

Wait times for hip and knee surgeries fell at all four Manitoba hospitals where the procedures are performed. The biggest decline was at Grace Hospital, where the median wait time fell from 57 weeks in June to 41 weeks in July. Wait times also dropped at Concordia Hospital, Brandon Regional Health Centre and Boundary Trails Health Centre.

The median wait time is the point at which half of patients wait longer and half wait less. It doesn’t include the time it takes to see a specialist and it can differ significantly between hospitals and individual surgeons. Many patients still report wait times for hip and knee surgery of well over a year, sometimes two.

There are are also regional disparities. The median wait time for hip replacement in Winnipeg, for example, was 23 weeks in July. It was 38 weeks at Brandon Regional Health Centre and 37 weeks at Boundary Trails Health Centre.

Manitobans are waiting even longer for knee-replacement surgery: 40 weeks in Winnipeg and between 37 and 47 weeks outside the capital city.

Manitobans are waiting even longer for knee-replacement surgery: 40 weeks in Winnipeg and between 37 and 47 weeks outside the capital city.

Still, the numbers are starting to come down. It’s a bit early to call it a trend, but the additional capacity over the summer months has had an impact.

The biggest threat to keeping these numbers up is the severe shortage of nurses and anesthesiologists. Hospitals were able to recruit enough staff over the summer to exceed normal output for that time of year. Whether that can be sustained through the fall and winter remains unclear (especially if there’s another spike in COVID-19 hospitalizations). The decision to send some patients out of province for hip and knee procedures will help, but it’s a relatively small number (as many as 750 per year). Expanding orthopedic surgery at Concordia Hospital, which is expected to add up to 1,000 hip and knee procedures per year, will also add much-needed capacity. However, construction of the new operating room there is behind schedule. It was supposed to open by the end of 2022, but has been delayed to March.

The decision to send some patients out of province for hip and knee procedures will help, but it’s a relatively small number (as many as 750 per year).

Meanwhile, the province has also ramped up cataract surgeries over the summer, mostly at Misericordia Health Centre and at Western Surgery Centre, a private clinic the province has been contracting with for years. All told, 1,310 cataract surgeries were performed in July at five facilities across the province. The three-year average for July prior to the pandemic was 963. The province has increased the number of cataract surgeries since February, although it’s unclear how the higher output has impacted wait times. Manitoba Health doesn’t publish accurate wait lists for cataract surgery. The province combines the wait times for the first and second eye, which skews the results. Wait times for the first eye can be as long as a year or more, whereas the second eye is typically done within a few weeks. Publishing the average for the two combined is grossly misleading.

Far more needs to be done to reduce wait times and clear the surgical backlog. But it’s important to acknowledge that some progress has been made.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca

Tom Brodbeck
Columnist

Tom has been covering Manitoba politics since the early 1990s and joined the Winnipeg Free Press news team in 2019.

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