One in eight Canadians currently awaits healthcare services, diagnostic care: Data shows

Data sets from its CanadaWaits project released Tuesday showed 631,527 people are currently waiting for surgeries across Canada, with a total of 1,083,957 people waiting to see a specialist, while 1,419,369 residents are waiting for diagnostic care.

Launched in November of 2022, CanadaWaits publically tracks the number of Canadians on waiting lists.

“Overall, we’ve seen a rise in patients waiting. This is not good news,” spokesperson Dom Lucyk said in the organization’s news release. “We’ve seen positive movement in some parts of the country, but overall, we’re going in the wrong direction.”

The report pointed to a few positive signs of advances in Quebec, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

While Quebec reported a slight decline in its surgical waitlists (-2.1 percent), it showed much more substantial progress among its diagnostic waitlists (-41.5 per cent).

Reporting a decline of 20.9 percent in its surgical waitlists, Manitoba saw a 15.1 percent drop in its diagnostic queues, although it only provided data for four types of surgeries and five types of diagnostic scans, Secondstreet noted.
Although both Saskatchewan and Manitoba did not provide statistics on specialist waitlists, as of Dec. 13, Saskatchewan reported a 17.4 percent drop in residents waiting for surgical procedures and an eight per cent decline of those on diagnostic waitlists.

The report highlighted that Ontario did see progress on its surgical waitlists with a drop of 6.2 percent, but its diagnostic queue rose dramatically by 43.8 per cent.

According to Fraser Institute's statistics, the median wait time for surgeries across Canada has risen from 9.3 weeks in 1993 to 27.7 weeks in 2023.

(Reporting by Asha Bajaj)