But for surgeons who performed both private and public procedures, their patients scheduled for in-hospital surgery waited about 14 weeks in 1993 and 1994, up to 23 weeks in 1996. So patients awaiting public sector surgery would wait up to 13 weeks longer if their surgeon also operated privately. An increase in a wait time does not automatically mean, as some might assume, that there are fewer procedures being performed. There is more cataract surgery being done in hospital now than ever before. Seniors tend to have surgery sooner, possibly because retired people have more flexible schedules than do people in the work force.
Nothing suggests a pattern of increase.
In fact, for the procedures we studied, the few where waits increased were outnumbered by those where waits decreased. That's not to suggest that there is nothing of concern. For instance, while the median wait for coronary angioplasty has been up and down over the last seven years, it is up in our most recent year of study, and a smaller proportion of patients received the procedure with 30 days of angiogram. So it will be important to assess whether this is the beginning of a trend or merely another random fluctuation. Waiting times are a concern in any publicly financed health care system.