Manitoba cardiac surgery wait list swells amid pandemic

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This article was published 09/12/2021 (1711 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The number of Manitobans in need of heart surgery has swelled to 216 people as of Thursday, with more than one-third of them waiting in excess of six months.

Eighty-nine people who require cardiac surgery have been on provincial wait lists for 180 days or more, a spokesman for Shared Health said. Elective cardiac surgeries, for stable patients experiencing heart health problems, are typically scheduled to occur within 48 to 180 days.

According to provincial data, the longest median wait time for elective cardiac surgery in the past year was in September, at 123 days.

“Manitoba’s health-care system has worked to maintain non-emergent cardiac services throughout the pandemic, but increased COVID activity through various waves that forced the redeployment and reassignment of surgical staff to critical care have caused this wait list to slowly grow over the past 21 months,” the spokesman said in a statement to the Free Press.

“We continue to make efforts to ensure sufficient staffing resources are available for non-emergent cardiac surgeries to proceed.”

The spokesman said an average of three non-emergent cardiac surgeries have been performed each day this week.

New figures released Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information showed the average number of cardiac surgeries performed each month in Manitoba during the pandemic dropped by about 10 per cent compared to 2019.

The independent, not-for-profit organization released statistics from across Canada measuring the impact of COVID-19 on the hospital system from March 2020 to June 2021.

According to the data, all types of surgery in Manitoba saw an average monthly decline in activity compared to 2019. Overall, surgeries dropped by an average of 1,900 cases a month through the pandemic.

Manitoba was able to average 403 cardiac surgeries a month from March 2020 and June 2021. However, that represented a decrease of about 45 cases a month, compared to the 2019 average of 448.

The most significant decline in cardiac surgical activity in 2021 occurred in January, when the number of surgeries dropped by 26 per cent. In 2020, the biggest drop came early in the pandemic when 36 per cent fewer procedures were performed in April.

Meanwhile, the number of hip and knee, cataract, hernia, and disc surgeries — plus a suite of other “high-volume procedures” — performed each month in the pandemic decreased by 31 per cent over 2019, with 881 fewer procedures completed on average.

The worst months for other general surgery correspond to the second and third pandemic waves, with 63 per cent fewer surgeries being performed in December 2020 and 67 per cent fewer performed in June 2021.

Cancer surgeries performed through the pandemic also dropped by a monthly average of eight per cent, with 484 procedures performed on average compared to the 529 performed monthly in 2019.

Data also show Manitoba was able to make some small gains in the summer of 2020, with seven per cent more procedures performed in July that year compared to 2019; data for the summer of 2021 was not available.

Provincial health officials estimate the total surgical backlog to include between 25,000 and 30,000 patients; advocacy group Doctors Manitoba puts that number closer to 56,000.

On Wednesday, Health Minister Audrey Gordon announced a diagnostic and surgical recovery task force to expedite the thousands of procedures that have been delayed due to the pandemic.

The task force is expected to provide its first progress report early next year.

danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca