“ontario, alberta, and other provinces are hiring private clinics to help provide surgery to patients in the public system. this is a good first step,” said craig. “sweden and other european countries have shown this can help. however, more needs to be done.”
the report notes that some provinces provided only partial data to requests for information, and that the true number of people dying on wait lists may thus be even higher. extrapolating from the known data, it estimates that more than 31,000 patients died on wait lists last year.
in addition to those higher numbers, the report includes several caveats. for instance, it notes that a patient may not have been medically ready for a particular treatment at time of death, or they may have been waiting to receive another procedure first.
there are also probably cases in which death occurred for reasons unrelated to the patient’s condition. “for example,” the report states, “the system may have been timely about scheduling a procedure or appointment with a specialist but, during the wait, the patient died in a motor vehicle accident.”
however, the report cautions against dismissing deaths that occurred while patients were waiting for quality-of-life procedures such as eye surgery or a hip replacement. it points out that inactivity while waiting for such operations can contribute to other health problems and lead to premature death. also, “patients often value eyesight and mobility as much as life itself.”