Commitment to truth will clear up Tories’ blurred vision Doctors, data sharpen focus on cataract surgery wait-time reality after provincial government’s premature pandemic-backlog victory lap By: Dan Lett Posted: 7:00 PM CST Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/12/2022 (749 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s no doubt about it. It was a mistake.

In a column this week, I wrote that both Health Minister Audrey Gordon and Kevin Klein, the Progressive Conservative candidate in the Kirkfield Park byelection, had claimed that “waiting lists” for cataract surgery had been eliminated.

While Klein did, in fact, claim there was “no wait list for cataract surgery,” Gordon had only claimed the backlog of cases caused by pandemic restrictions had been cleared.

Normally, when journalists make mistakes, we file corrections that appear on page A2 in the print edition, and immediately below the article in question online. And then, we tuck our tails between our legs and move on to another story so we don’t have to be reminded about our sloppiness.

In this case, I’m going to own the mistake so that I can take a deeper look into the lies the government tells itself about surgical wait times.

In broad terms, the province has allowed wait times on priority surgical procedures — hips and knee replacements, cataract surgeries — to grow significantly under its watch. And that is saying something, because Manitoba was, when the Tories took power, one of the worst places in Canada to get cataract surgery.

The Canadian Institute of Health Information measures a province’s effectiveness in delivering elective surgeries based on a national median wait time. Currently, that is 112 days, or 16 weeks.

Manitoba has never even come close to the national median. The best performance in recent years was in 2015, under the former NDP government, when 41 per cent got their surgery within the median wait time.

That 41 per cent is a bad result, but it starts to look pretty good when you consider what has happened since the Tories took power.

In 2016, the year the Tories formed government, only 34 per cent of cataract patients got surgery within 16 weeks. That metric fell in 2017 to 32 per cent and remained largely unchanged in 2019 at 33 per cent.

Manitoba has never even come close to the national median. The best performance in recent years was in 2015, under the former NDP government, when 41 per cent got their surgery within the median wait time.

In 2020 and 2021 — the pandemic years, as defined by CIHI — our situation improved slightly when we did 39 per cent of all cataract surgeries within the median wait time. But there’s a huge caveat on that number.

All provinces did fewer priority elective surgeries, as health-care resources were moved to the front lines of the pandemic. However, no province cut back on surgeries more than Manitoba.

Here, the government reduced the total number of cataract procedures by more than 40 per cent, which was twice the national average. So, a larger proportion of overall cataract surgeries were done within the median wait time, but only because dramatically fewer surgeries were done.

That is the dictionary definition of a qualified victory.

Now, let’s move on to the issue at hand: my erroneous use of the word wait times.

In a recent question period, both Stefanson and Gordon claimed a “backlog” of 1,200 cataract procedures caused by the pandemic has been “eliminated” and were treated to thunderous applause from their fellow Tories. Unfortunately, there is very little evidence to support that claim.

After the Tories claimed victory, their claim has been disputed by individual cataract surgeons, the Eye Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba and Doctors Manitoba.

We all have a responsibility in this debate to be accountable… For members of the government, it means making a solemn New Year’s resolution that it stop lying to itself about progress on reducing surgical wait times.

Doctors Manitoba, which has painstakingly tracked the COVID-caused backlog of surgical and diagnostic procedures, estimated the total cataract backlog from pandemic conditions at closer to 4,800 cases as of 2021, with little signs of improvement since. And the province reported recently that as of September, 5,700 people were still waiting for cataract surgery, which is comparable to the number that existed in 2019 before the pandemic hit.

However, individual surgeons and the EPSM — based on first-hand experience and backed up by CIHI data — have stated categorically that despite an increase in the overall number of procedures being done, patients are spending considerably more time waiting for surgery than was the case before the pandemic.

And then there is the issue of consultations.

CIHI defines a wait time as the period between a confirmed diagnosis that a surgery is needed, and the actual procedure. Left out of the CIHI definition, and thus not reported by the provinces, is how long it takes to get to see a specialist to get that diagnosis.

News organizations, including the Free Press, have documented the stories of individual patients who are still being told — even after the backlog was “eliminated” — that they will have to wait 12-16 months for a consultation, and up to six months after that to get surgery.

The interminable wait for a consultation apparently came as a surprise to the government, which confirmed it does not track that part of the process. Had it done so, it’s likely the Tories would not have tried to pat themselves on the back for eliminating the backlog.

We all have a responsibility in this debate to be accountable. For columnists, that means admitting mistakes and being more precise in the use of language.

For members of the government, it means making a solemn New Year’s resolution that it stop lying to itself about progress on reducing surgical wait times.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com

Dan Lett
Columnist

Born and raised in and around Toronto, Dan Lett came to Winnipeg in 1986, less than a year out of journalism school with a lifelong dream to be a newspaper reporter.

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