Over half a million fewer surgeries have been performed since start of COVID-19: report
Global News
The report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information found surgeries unrelated to COVID-19 fell by about 35,000 per month on average.
Over half a million fewer surgeries were performed across Canada during the first 16 months of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to previous years, a new report suggests.
The report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) drives home the profound strain the pandemic has had on every province and territory’s health-care system, which will continue to be challenged even after COVID-19’s impact fades.
“We don’t know where the health-care system is going to land as it works to build back better,” said Tracy Johnson, director of health system analytics at CIHI.
“Addressing this surgical backlog will certainly be one of the many challenges the system faces as it continues to adapt to the pandemic.”
About 560,000 fewer surgeries were performed between March 2020 and June 2021 compared to the previous 16-month period through 2019, according to health data compiled and analyzed by CIHI for the report.
Most of that decline occurred during the first wave of the pandemic in March and April 2020, when Johnson says the health-care system — along with every other sector of the country and the world — was struggling to figure out how to respond to COVID-19.
“When you look at the rest of the time period, from last summer through to this summer, what you can see is systems adapting to this new information,” she said.
“They figured out how to triage, figured out how to turn the tables and how literally to turn things back on. And you can see the different provinces were able to ramp up their surgeries faster or slower, depending on what their system was like.”
