Left waiting for wait-list data

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This article was published 14/02/2024 (680 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If it were a mere coincidence, it was an awfully peculiar one.

Hours after the opposition Progressive Conservatives last week criticized the NDP government for failing to provide Manitobans with updated wait time data for medical procedures, the province released fresh statistics.

Until last Friday, the data displayed on the province’s online wait time dashboard was current only to August 2023 — a lag of nearly six months.

When the Tories were in office, that lag time was typically two to three months (still unacceptable, but better than a six-month delay).

The updated data posted last week is current until December. It shows there have been few improvements over the past year in delays for procedures such as hip and knee replacement surgery and cataract removal. There was a marginal improvement for cardiac surgery.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said the timing of the data update last week was a coincidence. That is difficult to accept from a government that removed all wait-time data from its website late last year, only to re-post it after our sister paper, the Winnipeg 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 government accountable for how it uses tax dollars to manage the province’s publicly funded health-care system.

Current data, including a breakdown of wait times by hospital, is also important to ensure patients have relevant information about where they can access the shortest wait times, which are not uniform across the province.

The federal government has recently called on the provinces to improve the quality of wait-time information and other online health-care data. Ottawa has even made future increases to the Canada Health Transfer contingent on those improvements. The NDP’s lack of commitment to provide the public with timely information about wait times seems to fall short of those expectations.

More importantly, long wait times for procedures such as hip and knee replacement and cataract surgery are still considerable, the new data shows.

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

There are also serious questions about how wait times for cataract surgery are calculated.

The province calculates the wait time for initial surgery on the first eye (which often takes up to a year or more) and combines it with the shorter wait time for the second eye. The latter is usually measured in days or weeks. Government publishes the average wait time between the two, which is misleading.

The true wait time is how long it takes to access initial surgery. However, those numbers are not published.

Considering the NDP government has been in office less than four months, it can’t really be faulted for today’s long wait lists. Yet the New Democrats have shown an appalling lack of commitment to publish up-to-date wait-time information for medical procedures.

PC health critic and Roblin MLA Kathleen Cook told media this week that the NDP’s shortsighted decision to disband the Diagnostic and Surgical Recovery Task Force after taking power may have inadvertently caused the delay in updated wait-time data, as there was no one left to do the necessary work.

“I think they were caught shorthanded, I guess I’ll say, when they cut the task force and then realized they had nobody to update this data. That’s my suspicion,” Cook said.

The Kinew government claims to be working on an improved centralized wait-time information system. That may be, but it should not prevent the province from publishing existing data. A promise of a better system some time in the future doesn’t abrogate government’s responsibility for the already existing one.

Failure to show the current picture honestly, clearly and in a timely manner simply gives the impression government has something to hide.

Perhaps the NDP brain trust should be a bit more careful about the Pallister and Stefanson-era programs that they choose to trim — or kill outright. Careless mistakes can come back to hurt them under a watchful public eye.

» Winnipeg Free Press and The Brandon Sun