Long waits for elective surgery in Canada’s health-care system left one teenage boy in Peachland, B.C., feeling like “the Hunchback of Notre Dame,” he said, as he waited nearly two years for surgery to treat his scoliosis.
Cael Perry’s journey through B.C.’s health-care system points to the shortcomings in public health care for many types of elective surgeries, experts say. According to data provided by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and analyzed by CBC, nearly 30 per cent of Canadians didn’t receive their joint replacement or cataract surgery within medically acceptable time frames in 2019 — even before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. Now, many Canadians are still waiting longer than they were three years ago for these procedures.
It’s a crisis that has some doctors pushing for private care, while others urge Canadians to keep their faith in the public system and push for better organization of the resources that are already available.
“We are in a crisis right now. It has brought us to the brink. We’re at risk of really undoing a lot of amazing work of public medicare for the last, you know, 50 or 60 years,” said Prof. Colleen Flood, University Research Chair in Health Law & Policy at the University of Ottawa.
Cael’s mother, Sharlene Perry, first noticed something wasn’t right while cutting her son’s hair in November 2020. He was 15 at the time and had just started Grade 10.
“We took a picture and … you could tell both from the back and the front that there was a twist there, that he was not normal,” she said, noting that his back had looked completely fine only months earlier.
