Wait times for major medical procedures still longer than pre-pandemic levels, data shows

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An IV pole is seen in a room in the emergency ward at The Montreal Children's Hospital on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024 in Montreal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christinne Muschi
Five years on from the COVID-19 pandemic, wait times for key surgeries have yet to bounce back, new data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) shows.
Released Thursday, the data set tracks wait times for 'priority procedures' such as hip and knee replacements, cataract surgeries, cancer treatments including radiation therapy, and diagnostic imaging like MRI and CT scans.
While the total count of scheduled procedures has risen for some since 2019, the numbers show, Canadian patients are often still waiting longer to get them than before the pandemic began.
'Health systems are managing multiple challenges, including an aging and growing population, rising demand for procedures, and health workforce shortages,' CIHI noted in a release. 'More scheduled procedures are being performed to meet growing demand.'
Playing catch-up
The data shows that, surgery-to-surgery, some kinds of procedures performed on Canadian patients have returned to pre-pandemic totals or even exceeded them.
Between April and September of 2019, Canadian surgeons replaced 22,000 hips and 35,000 knees, and while those numbers dropped significantly at the outset of COVID-19, they rebounded to 28,000 and 42,000, respectively, over the same six-month period in 2024.
Cataract surgeries told a similar story, falling by roughly 50 per cent between 2019 and 2020, but ending the summer of 2024 at 11 per cent more than the 2019 total. On the whole, cancer surgery totals have grown seven per cent since before the pandemic, and 16 per cent more MRI and CT scans were completed last year than during the same period in 2019.
The news isn't all good.
While totals for some procedures may have caught up to 2019, Canada's patient population has changed significantly in the intervening years, meaning that wait times haven't necessarily come down in length.
National benchmarks recommend that patients receive hip or knee replacements within six months, but last year, only 68 per cent of hip replacements and 61 per cent of knee replacements happened within that deadline, down from 75 and 70 per cent, respectively, in 2019.
The problem is also true for radiation therapies, which saw the number of patients receiving care within the 28-day recommended wait falling by three percentage points between 2019 and 2024.
For surgery to repair hip fractures, the benchmark is tighter at just 48 hours. Eighty-three per cent of patients got their surgery within that deadline last year, down from 86 per cent, five years earlier.
Meanwhile, cataract surgeries have nearly rebounded to pre-pandemic waits, with 69 per cent of procedures conducted within the 112-day recommended time frame, down one percentage point from 70 in 2019.
And it's not just about meeting benchmarks.
CIHI notes that wait times have grown for diagnostic tests, like MRI and CT scans, as well as for major treatments including for breast, bladder, colorectal and lung cancer.
Median wait times for treatment have grown by between one and five days for each of the above cancers, and by nine days for prostate cancer, which still has fewer procedures conducted annually, compared to 2019.
As of last year, the median patient waited 50 days for prostate cancer surgery.
Breaking the backlog
CIHI says wait times are downstream from a variety of issues.
Not only has Canada's population grown in the time since the pandemic began, reaching more than 41.5 million people as of this year, but that population also skews older than before. The 65-and-older age group grew 19 per cent over the five years covered by the data set, almost twice as fast as Canada's overall population growth.
What's more, a shortage of health-care workers across the country has made meeting the rising demand for surgery more difficult, with populations of key providers like anesthesiologists and orthopedic surgeons growing significantly slower than the country as a whole.
The result: More patients, presenting with more complex issues, and comparatively fewer resources to go around.
'In many cases, post-pandemic patients have presented later to the surgeon and presented with more complex problems than they would have in the past,' said James Howard, chief of orthopedic surgery at London Health Sciences Centre, in a CIHI release.
'We continue to have increasing demand for care for the baby boomer generation. These factors have a combined effect on wait times for surgery.'
The institute raises some potential solutions to the deepening strain on the health-care system, from a more streamlined process for booking and intake for specialized care, to closely monitoring wait lists to prioritize patients based on health status and readiness for surgery, to exploring new and different settings for some kinds of care.
'Managing wait times for surgery remains a priority as health systems address the challenges of an aging and growing population, as well as health workforce shortages,' the report concludes.
'Despite an increase in the number of surgeries performed, the capacity of health systems to meet wait time targets for these surgeries remains strained.'
With files from The Canadian Press