Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada (10th Edition)
by Martin Zelder with Greg Wilson
Preface
This Critical Issues Bulletin is the Institute's tenth attempt to document the extent to which queues for visits to specialists and for diagnostic and surgical procedures are being used to control health care expenses. When we began producing waiting-list measures in 1988, there was anecdotal evidence that hospital waiting times were becoming significant. However, there were no systematic measurements of the extent of waiting.
At that time, partial waiting-list measurements made by hospitals and government departments were viewed as politically sensitive and were not made generally available. While these official waiting lists are now more readily accessible, they are still incomplete, meaning that there are no comprehensive measures other than those produced by The Fraser Institute by which to measure the length of waiting lists in Canada.
The contents of the survey have been corroborated to the extent possible by recourse to other sources of information. In particular, copies of the preliminary drafts of the study were sent to all of the provincial ministers of health for their comments, as well as to provincial cardiac and cancer agencies.
Measurement is crucial to understanding how any system works; where a system contains problems, it is the key to finding solutions. Largely as a result of the intense public interest in our past publications, waiting lists are now a component of any serious debate on the health care system in Canada. We hope that this interest in waiting lists continues and that Canadian policymakers begin to consider seriously the implications of queuing as they design alternatives to our present health care arrangements.
While this study and its widespread distribution has been enthusiastically supported by The Fraser Institute, the work has been independently conducted and the views expressed may or may not conform to those of the members and trustees of The Fraser Institute.
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