Waiting on Health Care Waiting Lists – Winnipeg Free Press

Opinion

If it was just a coincidence, it was very special.

Hours after the opposition Progressive Conservatives criticized the NDP government last week for not providing Manitobans with updated data on wait times for medical procedures, the province released the new statistics.

Until last Friday, the data displayed on the province's online wait time dashboard was only current until August 2023 — a delay of about six months. When the Tories were in office, this lag time was usually two to three months (still unacceptable, but better than a six-month lag).

The updated data, published last week, is valid through December. This suggests that there have been modest improvements in delays for procedures such as hip and knee replacement surgery and cataract removal over the past year. There have been significant improvements in cardiac surgery.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said last week that the timing of the data update was coincidental. This is hard to accept from a government that removed all waiting time data from its website late last year, only to repost it later. Free press wrote about it.

Manitobans deserve accurate, up-to-date data on wait times for surgical, diagnostic and other medical procedures for many reasons, not the least of which is to hold the government accountable for how it uses tax dollars to manage the province's publicly funded health care system. system.

Current data, including a breakdown of wait times by hospital, is important to ensure patients have adequate information about where they can access the shortest wait times, which vary across the province.

The federal government recently called on provinces to improve the quality of wait time information and other online health data. Ottawa has even increased the Canada Health Transfer quota in the future because of these improvements. The NDP's lack of commitment to provide the public with timely information on waiting times seems to fall short of these expectations.

Most notably, long wait times for procedures such as hip and knee replacements and cataract surgery are still significant, new data shows.

The average wait time for all hip and knee surgeries across the province in December was 26 weeks, unchanged from 25 weeks in August 2022 and 28 weeks in December. The average wait time for cataract surgery has remained largely unchanged at five to six weeks. last year.

There are also complex questions about how the waiting time for cataract surgery is calculated.