Task force ‘updates’ largely meaningless

Opinion

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This article was published 02/06/2023 (529 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Stefanson government’s wait time task force says it has significantly reduced or eliminated backlogs for medical procedures. However, the province still refuses to release supporting data to substantiate those claims.

Officials from the Diagnostic and Surgical Recovery Task Force provided one of its regular “updates” Wednesday at Victoria General Hospital. They claim hospitals have eliminated or significantly reduced backlogs for 36 procedures that were created during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What they haven’t done is provided the public with any details around most of those procedures, including wait times, the volume of patients on wait lists or the number of cases completed by month. Without that information, it’s impossible to estimate whether backlogs have been reduced or eliminated. If they have that information, they’re not making it public.

Task force officials say they have eliminated or reduced backlogs by 40 per cent or more for procedures such as pediatric surgery, oral surgery, neurosurgery and echocardiography.

But without supporting data or more detail, those figures are essentially meaningless.

It’s similar to claims by the Stefanson government that it has added 900 more front-line health-care workers to the system without providing details on the number that have resigned or retired. Officials just want the public to trust them.

The task force, which was created by the Stefanson government in 2021, provides data for some procedures on its online dashboard: hip, knee, cataract and cardiac surgeries, as well as MRIs, CT scans, ultrasounds, bone density and myocardial perfusion tests.

The dashboard provides information on median wait times, the number of patients on wait lists, the volume of procedures performed and breakdowns by health facilities. It also estimates backlogs for each.

It’s useful information that allows the public (and those working on the front lines) to track wait times and capacity in the system, including the number of procedures performed each month.

Health officials say that level of detail is limited to those procedures because they’re part of a central intake system, which allows government to track them more accurately. Fair enough. But if government is making claims that it has reduced or eliminated backlogs for many other procedures, they have an obligation to report the data they’re using to draw those conclusions. They haven’t done so.

Providing supporting data is useful for a number of reasons. When government reports, for example, that the backlog for hip replacement surgery has been reduced by more than 50 per cent, the public can also see that median wait times for that procedure are longer now (30 weeks in March, the most recent data available) compared with the same month four years ago (20 weeks).

The reason for that is demand for the surgery continues to grow and government isn’t funding enough procedures to keep up. As a result, the number of patients waiting by month for hip surgery has grown from 582 in March 2019 to 890 in March 2023.

Eliminating the backlog doesn’t mean much if wait times are still growing. The public deserves to see the full picture, not just a small slice of the data.

Instead of focusing on that and providing Manitobans with meaningful and complete data, the task force provides public relations “updates” with very limited information. Their objective is a political one: to show that government is making progress, even though wait times are growing in many areas.

Wait times for all four surgeries reported on the task force’s dashboard were higher in 2022 than in 2019, the year before the pandemic. The volume of patients on wait lists was also higher in 2022 than in 2019 for those surgeries. Wait times for three of five diagnostic tests reported on the dashboard were lower in 2022 than in 2019.

The reason the Stefanson government is focusing on backlogs is because it’s the one area they can show progress across the board. They would like nothing better than to announce before the next provincial election, slated for Oct. 3, that they have eliminated all (or the vast majority) of pandemic backlogs and present that as a significant achievement. It would be a good headline.

On its own, backlog information is a meaningless metric. Without supporting data, it tells the public virtually nothing about the state of health care in Manitoba.

» Tom Brodbeck has been covering Manitoba politics since the early 1990s and joined the Winnipeg Free Press news team in 2019. This column previously appeared in the Free Press.