Ontario Doctors Call for Steps to Reduce Healthcare Backlog

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an overwhelming backlog in healthcare services, which has grown worse in recent months as patients return to doctors’ offices, according to a new report.

In response, the Ontario Medical Association has again called for the adoption of its five-point plan for better healthcare. The plan is intended to reduce wait times, expand mental health and addiction services, improve home care and community care, strengthen public health and pandemic preparedness, and give every patient a team of healthcare providers who are linked digitally.

Dr Rose Zacharias

“We were dealing with long wait times before the pandemic, but that has grown with millions of patient procedures that are backlogged and need to catch up,” Rose Zacharias, MD, president of the Ontario Medical Association, told Medscape Medical News.

“It’s impacting people’s quality of life, and it’s become a massive burden on mental health,” she said. “When we’ve asked people about the most important issues in the upcoming election, healthcare is their top priority.”

The association first published its five-point plan in October 2021.

“We Need Doctors”

The pandemic backlog has grown to almost 22 million services, marking an increase of 1 million in the past 3 months, according to an analysis by the association. The increase likely reflects the pause in nonemergency treatments and procedures as the Omicron variant spread at the beginning of 2022.

Patients are also beginning to reengage with the healthcare system after having waited during the pandemic, and many are showing up sicker and with more undiagnosed health needs, Zacharias said.

The backlog includes a wide variety of services, such as routine checkups, childhood immunizations, diagnostic tests, and surgeries, as well as newly identified problems that now need treatment. Some patients may be waiting for more than one service.

“I work in the emergency department and in mental healthcare and see people in crisis, sitting and waiting to be cared for,” Zacharias said. “As one example, over the weekend, several patients dealing with addiction and at risk for harming themselves were waiting to be transferred out to a psychiatrist, with the longest wait at 80 hours.”

To address the backlog, the Ontario Medical Association has developed a set of 75 recommendations, the Prescription for Ontario: Doctors’ 5-Point Plan for Better Health Care. The plan urges lawmakers to improve access to care and invest in the healthcare system during the next 4 years.

The plan’s first priority is to reduce wait times and the backlog of services by addressing the doctor shortage, providing adequate funding to hospitals and community clinics, shifting more surgical services to community-based specialty settings, increasing the number of nurses and technologists for imaging services, and better integrating services across palliative care, long-term care, home care, and community care.

The next step is to expand mental health and addiction…