Wait times for surgery, cancer care and other procedures have been hot topics lately. Harrowing stories of patients having to wait so long their disease progressed beyond remedy are countered by BC Health officials, including the minister, reassuring the public about how great B.C. is doing and the progress it’s making on wait times.
So we did a little digging to try to find out how B.C. stacks up compared to other provincial jurisdictions.
Median wait time stats
Wait time is generally defined as the lag between obtaining a doctor’s referral for a medically necessary treatment until the patient actually gets the procedure or diagnostic test done.
In 2023, British Columbia had a median wait time of 27.7 weeks from referral by a general practitioner to treatment. This matched the national median wait time and was the third shortest among provinces.
Ontario had the shortest total wait time at 21.6 weeks, followed by Quebec at 27.6 weeks.
The longest wait times were in Nova Scotia (56.7 weeks), Prince Edward Island (55.2 weeks), and New Brunswick (52.6 weeks).
In 2022, BC’s wait time increased 25.8 weeks to 27.7 weeks in 2023.
While BC has relatively shorter wait times compared to most provinces, it still exceeds what is considered clinically reasonable. The actual wait time in Canada overall is 4.6 weeks longer than what physicians consider reasonable.
For instance, in B.C., plastic surgery has the longest wait time at 95.7 weeks, followed by 52 weeks for orthopaedic surgery, 40.2 weeks for gynaecology and 34.8 weeks for neurosurgery. Yet the median reasonable patient wait for those surgeries, as determined by the specialists, is 25.1 weeks for plastic surgery, 20.2 weeks for orthopaedic surgery, 13 weeks for gynaecology, and 9.7 weeks for neurosurgery.
The quickest median wait times in B.C. are for radiation and medical oncology at 9.1 and 9.9 respectively, which still falls well short of the reasonable median wait times for those procedures: 2.8 weeks for radiation oncology and 3 weeks for medical oncology.
Median wait time for CT scans in B.C. is 9.1 weeks, compared to 4 weeks in Quebec. Median wait for an MRI in B.C. is about 5.5 months, versus 2.5 months in Ontario and Quebec.
Ontario and Quebec generally have shorter wait times than B.C. for most procedures and diagnostic tests.
Wait times throughout the entire Canadian health care system have increased steadily since 2000, and dramatically since the 1990s. In 1993, the median wait time in B.C. was 10.4 weeks and 9.3 weeks in Canada, compared to 27.7 weeks in 2023.
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