Op-ed highlights creative solutions to addressing surgery wait times

An op-ed this week by Cy Frank, expert adviser with EvidenceNetwork.ca and executive director of the Alberta Bone and Joint Health Institute, discussed creative solutions to reducing surgery wait times.

He used this analogy:

“Sometimes public health care is like the human body. When you have an ailment in one area, you need to look somewhere else in the anatomy for the cause or the contributor”

As we discussed in an earlier blog post, long waits are symptoms of wider system issues. This article demonstrates how effective setting measurable goals and targets can be. In this case, by using multidisciplinary teams and incentives to reach a benchmark, preliminary results are suggesting that this strategy has saved bed-days and improved wait times.

Read the op-ed here, and check out our Progress Report 2011 that reports on progress provinces and territories have made toward meeting the national wait time benchmarks that came out of the First Ministers’ 2004 Ten Year Plan.