Nova Scotians are still waiting an average of 23 weeks for surgery and other therapeutic treatments despite increased spending on health care, a new report says.
According to the Fraser Institute’s annual report on hospital wait times, the time it takes for patients to get from their family doctor’s office to the operating room has not changed substantially in the past decade.
“Throwing more money at a fundamentally broken system will not solve the wait time problem,’ Nadeem Esmail, Fraser Institute Director of Health System Performance Studies, said in a release “It’s time for politicians of all political stripes to admit the current system is a failure.”
While Nova Scotia’s wait times are still some of the longest in the country, the figures have actually improved significantly since last year, when the median total wait time was closer to 28 weeks.
Across Canada, total wait times averaged about 16.1 weeks. Newfoundland & Labrador recorded the longest waits with an average of 27.3 weeks, and Ontario recorded the shortest at 12.5 weeks.
