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

Canada saw 13% drop in surgeries in early years of COVID-19 pandemic, data suggests

Aug 02, 2023

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.

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cihi-report-2013-health-care-crisis-1.6924866