Surgery backlogs, staff shortages, no family doctor: New report highlights Canada's health-care crisis

A new report highlights Canada's major drop in surgeries during the early years of the pandemic, but those pains were felt unequally across the country's patchwork provincial health-care systems — with the largest decrease in procedures seen in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The findings were released Wednesday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), an independent organization which compiles and analyzes health system data.

The CIHI team found roughly 743,000 fewer surgeries were performed in Canada during the first 2½ years of the pandemic — a drop of about 13 per cent compared to 2019.

"It takes a long time to catch up when you have to cancel a large number of surgeries," said Kathleen Morris, CIHI's vice-president of research and analysis.

Despite the drop in surgeries, overtime hours in Canada's public hospitals from 2020 to 2021 increased by 15 per cent over the previous year — a "stark example" of the pressure COVID-19 put on health-care workers, the CIHI report noted.

The findings also shone a spotlight on other health-care issues, including staff shortages and burnout, levels of access to personal health information, and the roughly one in 10 Canadians who say they don't have a regular health-care provider.

The report is part of a sweeping effort to change how the country handles Canadians' health data. The federal Liberals have offered the provinces and territories billions in new spending over the next decade to address the country's health-care crisis and, in exchange, the regions must commit to improving how health data is collected and reported.

All provinces and territories have signed on, except Quebec, which did not provide any figures for CIHI's new report — leaving out health information for a population of roughly 8.8 million.

On the surgery front, the new data offers an up-to-date look at the impact of paused surgeries across Canada.

There was no change in the numbers of surgeries performed in P.E.I. from 2020 to mid-2022, compared to the year before the pandemic started, and only single-digit drops in Yukon, Northwest Territories, British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

Other provinces' declines in surgical volumes ranged from 13 to 18 per cent, while Newfoundland experienced the largest decrease at 21 per cent.

As CBC News has previously reported, the wait-list for hip and knee replacements alone in Newfoundland has remained stuck at 1,900 patients between 2022 and June of this year, despite provincial efforts to make orthopedic procedures more available. 

Surgeons also warned Newfoundland's health authority that doing more surgeries each year won't actually help the province tackle its backlog as its population ages. "Projections show that completing 1,100 cases annually will still result in wait-list growth to 4,500 people by third quarter 2029," reads a surgeons' letter, acquired through an access-to-information request.

To reduce their surgical backlogs, provincial and territorial health systems will have to increase their surgeries above pre-pandemic levels, CIHI noted in its new report.