Nova Scotia surgical wait-list currently at 22,600 patients, committee told

HALIFAX — Nova Scotia's surgery backlog sits at 22,600 patients, the legislature's health committee was told Tuesday.

Although the new figure is down from 26,000 in May, deputy health minister Jeannine Lagasse told the committee that major improvement will take time.

"Lowering our surgical wait times means fixing issues in many areas of the health system; it means looking at everything connected to surgery," said Lagasse.

The province will have to continue to recruit and retain surgeons, nurses and other surgical staff, and increase the number of beds for post-surgical care and improve access to diagnostic testing, she said.

Karen Oldfield, CEO of the provincial health authority, said the immediate goal is to get back to the surgery wait times in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The longer-term goal is to achieve national wait-time benchmarks for such things as orthopedic surgeries by mid-2025.

She said that to hit the benchmarks, the health system will have to perform an additional 2,500 surgeries a year. Currently, 50,000 surgeries are scheduled across the province.

"Taking on that workload plus additional (surgeries) is no easy task," Oldfield said.

She told the committee that part of the problem is a lack of information on how many people are waiting for surgical consults and referrals because of a largely paper-based records system with no central tracking.

Oldfield said the health authority is on track to implement a new email-based referral system by the end of March that will help it better manage its surgical wait-list.

"It will support more timely and equitable access to consults and improve communication with patients and providers," she said.

Oldfield said there's also been an increased emphasis on outpatient joint replacement surgeries that discharge patients the same day of a procedure.

"These can contribute to timely care allowing surgeries to go ahead even when beds are limited," she said.

More than 780 such surgeries have already been completed this year compared to just 49 performed in 2019-20, Oldfield said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 13, 2022.