Dr. Roland Orfaly: Solutions exist for B.C.’s record-setting surgery wait numbers
Credit to Author: Stephen Snelgrove| Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 01:00:35 +0000
Over 91,000 British Columbians are now on the province’s record-setting waitlist for medically necessary surgeries.
According to benchmarks created by the government, almost half of them have already waited “too long”. And they are still waiting.
Unfortunately, this is not news to most of us. We all have family, friends and neighbours who have had to wait far too long for important and sometimes life-saving procedures.
To be fair, our provincial government has made sizeable budgetary commitments.
In this year’s fiscal budget, nearly $23 billion of our tax dollars have been earmarked for health care, including an extra $100 million to improve surgical wait numbers.
That’s on top of the extra $75 million allocated last year in an effort to improve surgical waitlists and wait times.
While the money has been there, the results for B.C. patients are troubling.
Over the last year-and-a-half, the number of people waiting for surgery has increased from 85,468 to 91,150. This means that the waitlist for surgery has grown to be equal to the entire population of our provincial capital.
When he announced his government’s surgical strategy in March 2018, Premier John Horgan stated, “For far too long, far too many British Columbians were left on wait lists.”
We believe that Horgan and his colleagues in government sincerely want to meet their election campaign promise to “deliver quality healthcare where you need it, when you need it.”
However, good intentions must be matched by good decisions if the worsening trend in wait numbers is going to be reversed.
That is why the B.C. Anesthesiologists’ Society has been reaching out to all 87 Members of the Legislative Assembly.
Regardless of party affiliation, the province’s MLAs hear daily from their constituents about the stress and the suffering that is the result of unacceptable wait times.
The good news is that if our elected representatives want to fix this problem — and we believe that they do — the answers are right in front of them.
Over the course of the last decade, the B.C. Anesthesiologists’ Society and its members have developed and put forward several proven and effective solutions for the biggest challenges that delay access to surgery.
As recently as May of this year, we sent government a comprehensive list of key recommendations to address B.C.’s growing waitlist challenge.
We also previously offered 17 solutions — all of which the province endorsed, but unfortunately failed to implement.
Our recommendations are designed to reduce wait times by improving the efficiency of hospital operating rooms, to deliver safer care through optimal use of anesthesia physician assistants, and to increase training, recruitment, and retention of anesthesiologists who are needed right now in communities throughout our province.
These solutions align perfectly with the four “areas of focus” in the Horgan government’s surgical strategy, which include delivering more surgeries for “long waiters,” keeping up with the demand for all other surgical patients, making operating rooms more efficient, and ensuring that we have the right number of health professionals to meet patient needs.
The B.C. Anesthesiologists’ Society wants to get to work implementing these solutions, but that has been impossible without the government working together with us.
Agreeing with a solution is not the same as implementing that solution. Likewise, patients do not benefit when government promises are not kept.
B.C.’s anesthesiologists are ready, willing, and able to work with government to make the surgical strategy a success.
The province has made a clear promise to improve surgery wait times, and we have at least 17 consensus solutions to work with.
For the sake of 91,150 British Columbians, it’s time for government to step up and deliver.
Dr. Roland Orfaly is CEO of the B.C. Anesthesiologists’ Society and is a specialist physician who works as a staff anesthesiologist at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster.
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