Waiting Your Turn

The proportion of the population waiting for treatment varies from a low of 1.7% in Quebec to a high of 5.7% in Nova Scotia. [...] To obtain the national medians (displayed in the last column of tables 2, 3, 4, and 8) we use a similar ratio—the number of procedures done in that specialty in the province, divided by the total number of procedures done by spe- cialists in that specialty across all provinces. [...] To estimate the number of procedures for which people are waiting, the total annual number of procedures is divided by 52 (weeks per year) and then multiplied by the Fraser Institute’s estimate of the actual provincial average number of weeks waited. [...] This study’s weighting of medians and the estimation of the number of procedures for which patients are waiting are based on data for 2015/16 from the Discharge Abstract Database (DAD) (CIHI, 2017a), the National Ambulatory Care Reporting System (NACRS) (CIHI, 2017b), and the Hospital Morbidity Database (HMDB) (CIHI, 2017c) published by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). [...] In these cases, we div- ide the number of patients annually undergoing this type of operation among special- ties according to the proportion of specialists in each of the overlapping specialties: for example, if plastic surgeons constitute 75% of the group of specialists performing rhinoplasties, then the number of rhinoplasties counted under plastic surgery is the total multiplied by 0.75.