An interim measure, but not a solution By: Editorial Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Sep. 1, 2022

Opinion

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This article was published 31/08/2022 (749 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sending patients to Ontario and the U.S. should help clear Manitoba’s bulging surgical backlog. However, far more needs to be done to reduce the lengthy wait times thousands of Manitobans are now facing.

The province’s diagnostic and surgical recovery task force last week announced plans to send as many as 750 patients per year for hip and knee surgery to facilities in northwestern Ontario, North Dakota and Cleveland, Ohio. Task force chair Dr. Peter MacDonald said qualified candidates will have the option of applying to have their surgery performed out-of-province; the province will pay the cost of the surgery, travel and accommodations.

The announcement is good news for those waiting months or years in pain and agony for surgery. However, it will only make a small dent in the massive surgical backlog created during the COVID-19 pandemic. Wait times for procedures such as orthopedic and cataract surgery were already long prior to the pandemic, owing in large part to austerity measures forced on regional health authorities by the Progressive Conservative government.

The pandemic made those wait times worse. Still, sending patients out-of-province will provide relief for hundreds of Manitobans. As an interim measure, it is the right thing to do.

Manitoba’s bigger challenge is to build capacity at home, including expanding the number of surgeries it can perform each year. That won’t be easy to do, given the severe shortage of nurses and anesthetists in the province, and indeed across the country. However, there are some immediate steps that could be taken to boost surgical capacity — measures on which the province is dragging its heels.

Manitoba’s bigger challenge is to build capacity at home, including expanding the number of surgeries it can perform each year.

Ophthalmologists at Misericordia Health Centre, where many of Manitoba’s cataract surgeries are performed, say they have the staff and resources to perform more surgeries. What they don’t have is the funding from the province. Manitoba Health is using a request-for-services model to fund surgeries that forces facilities, including public-sector ones such as Misericordia, to bid on surgical contracts.

There may be nothing wrong with that model during normal times; it could be a useful way to find efficiencies in the system. However, it’s causing delays in getting funding to where it’s needed. Given the urgency to reduce wait times, that funding should be expedited.

What also needs to be fast-tracked is a plan to expand orthopedic surgery at Concordia Hospital. An additional operating room was slated to open there by the end of the year, but that has been delayed. The expansion is expected to boost capacity by an additional 1,000 hip and knee surgeries per year. A new surgeon has been hired, and the province says it has the staff to provide the additional surgeries.

What also needs to be fast-tracked is a plan to expand orthopedic surgery at Concordia Hospital… The expansion is expected to boost capacity by an additional 1,000 hip and knee surgeries per year.

However, the new operating room now won’t open until March 2023 at the earliest. The province has provided little explanation for the delay, except to say its cause is the usual slowdowns in construction. Considering how long some Manitobans are waiting for hip and knee surgery, no effort should be spared to get this additional capacity in motion as quickly as possible.

The key to avoiding a similar health-care crisis in the future is for government to commit to long-term, sustainable funding for hospitals and surgical programs. One of the main reasons Manitoba has among the longest wait times in Canada is because of cuts and freezes to hospital budgets in recent years.

It’s time for government to acknowledge that. While the out-of-province surgery plan does have short-term merit, the simple fact of the matter is that Manitobans should not have to travel beyond our borders for basic medical care.