50% of Canadian cancer patients faced surgery delay last year amid ongoing COVID backlog

The Canadian Institute for Health Information found that between April and September 2022, half of cancer patients waited one to three days longer for surgery than before COVID.

Cancer surgery wait times increased in 2022 as the Canadian health-care system continued to work through a surgical backlog from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report.

The report released Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), found that between April and September 2022, half of Canadian cancer patients waited for about one to three days longer for their breast, bladder, colorectal and lung cancer surgery compared with before the pandemic. The average wait time increased by about 12 days for prostate cancer. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, provinces asked their hospitals to ramp down elective surgeries in order to help curb the spread of the virus. As a result, many cancer patients had to forego their surgeries.

“We know that (hospitals) tried to maintain a priority on cancer surgeries, but we can see that there were still about 20 per cent fewer cancer surgeries in the three-year period than there were prior to the pandemic,” Tracy Johnson, director of Health System Analytics at CIHI, told Global News.

“So that suggests that there was some triaging going on. And there was there were some people who were delayed.”

CIHI’s report showed Canadians continue to face longer wait times for many surgeries such as knee and hip replacements and cataract procedures.

During the first 31 months of the pandemic, about 937,000 (14 per cent) fewer surgeries were performed in Canada compared with before the pandemic, the study found.

The largest decrease in surgeries occurred during the first four months of the pandemic (March to June 2020), and also during the Delta (May 2021) and Omicron (January 2022) waves.