B.C. is chipping away at its long waiting list for surgical care by completing more daily surgeries than it did pre-pandemic, according to a new report.
Between April 1 and Nov. 10, provincial doctors performed 215,188 scheduled and unscheduled surgeries, according to the province's mid-year progress report on the state of surgical care in B.C. That is 7,663 surgeries, or four per cent, more than the 207,525 surgeries performed during the same time period in 2019, according to the province.
More surgeries have helped shrink the province's waiting list to 86,426 people in November, compared with 91,544 people on the province's surgical waiting list in November 2019.
One thing that has helped the province perform more surgeries is more operating-room availability.
The number of available operating room hours shot up by 17,796 hours, to 376,399 hours, across the province, or by five per cent, compared with the same April 1 through Nov. 10 time period pre-pandemic, the government's report says.
Many surgeries were postponed during the pandemic to free up hospital beds in case they were needed for COVID-19 patients, and almost all of those surgeries have since been performed.
The province's data says 99.9 per cent of the 14,783 patients whose scheduled surgeries were postponed during the first wave of the pandemic, and who still wanted a surgical treatment, have had their surgeries.
Of the 3,166 patients whose scheduled surgeries were postponed during second and third waves of COVID-19-related surgical postponments, 99.2 per cent have had surgeries if that is what they wanted.
Waits remain common for even urgent surgeries.
The province said that between April 1 and Nov. 10, it completed 20,425 urgent scheduled surgeries within four weeks of the surgery being required. That is six per cent more than in the same timeframe in 2019, according to the government.
Hiring has helped the province increase its capacity. Government data show that B.C.'s health-care system has trained and added 180 surgical specialty nurses between April 1 and Nov. 10. That brings the total number of new trained surgical specialty nurses in B.C. to 798, since April 2020.
The government has also added 125 surgeons, 106 anesthesiologists, 181 perioperative nurses, 80 general practitioner anesthetists and 76 medical-device reprocessing technicians since April 2020.
"When surgeries are postponed, patients quickly have them rescheduled," B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix said in a release. "We're demonstrating the strength of our B.C. surgical system to overcome [the] challenge to get patients the surgeries they need."
