Smitherman launches new wait times web site

By Will Tremain –

Ontario Minister of Health George Smitherman has a shiny new website and he wants everyone to see it.

Ontariowaittimes.com is one public face of the Ontario Wait Time Strategy. It allows the public to go online and find out how long they’ll have to wait in this province order to get any of five elective medical procedures performed.

But right now, patients don’t seem to know about the site. And their waiting times still seem long.

If mom’s getting hip replacements, she can check the website to see which hospital in the province offers the shortest wait time for her to get the surgery done.

She can also check it if she wants information on wait times for surgery for cancer, cardiac bypass, cataracts, knee replacement, or medical imaging scans.

Smitherman appeared March 15 at Toronto General Hospital to announce the site, and to champion reductions in wait times for procedures in the province. Since Sept. 2005, Smitherman says, wait times for angiography are down 50 per cent, and for angioplasty they’re down almost 40 per cent.

Smitherman does not definitively say that giving the public a list of hospitals with the shortest wait time at the top might cause patient gluts for the procedure at that hospital. But it seems possible.

“What you want to create is the capacity for equally good service across the province,” says Smitherman.

In contrast, Dr. John Irish, chief of surgical oncology at Princess Margaret Hospital does admit that patient wait times at a hospital could be impacted by that hospital showing at the top of the list.

“We haven’t seen public overload of the system. Theoretically it might happen,” says Irish. He explains that sharing of patients between hospitals already does happen when one hospital is overloaded, so administrators could fix this problem quickly.

Frances M. is from Brampton, Ont. She hasn’t heard of the website. Her son was referred by his family doctor to a specialist at Toronto General Hospital.

“He saw the doctor last Monday, and came in today for a CT scan,” says Frances. Her son’s 11-day wait is in the middle of the range of shortest wait times available in the city for this scan – between three and 29 days. According to the website, if he’d gone to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, he might have had the scan four days after his referral.

Helen T. is from Toronto. She hasn’t heard of the website. She’s had one hip replaced.

“I was supposed to have surgery on the other hip. The wait was about a year and a half. I was scheduled for Dec. 2006. But I wasn’t in pain. Then the doctor decided to cancel it. What’s the point,” says Helen. In theory, her wait would now be as little as 108 days to get the hip replaced at a Toronto hospital, according to the website.

Smitherman may be fortunate in being able to report drops in wait times for several procedures in Ontario, as the website’s data spans only the last 18 months since it was baselined. A report from the conservative Fraser Institute issued this month shows a different picture on a longer timeframe.

“Wait times for a specialist after referral by a general practitioner increased 72.5 per cent between 1997 and 2006, while wait times to receive treatment after an appointment with a specialist increased 32.4 per cent,” the Fraser Institute report says. “The wait time for a CT scan increased from 4.1 weeks to 4.3 weeks between 1997 and 2006,” the report adds.

Maybe Ontarians are just lucky compared to the rest of the country. Or maybe Smitherman is lucky he’s reporting on data barely 18 months old.