About 70 percent of Ontarians report waiting longer than three months to see a specialist or have a diagnostic test, according to a new survey.
he survey, conducted by Abacus Data, found that 70 percent of Ontario residents said they or someone they know had waited longer than three months to see a specialist or receive diagnostic care, including one-third who waited longer than six months.
The Ontario PC government recently announced public funding will be used at four private health clinics for hip and knee replacements. There will be $125 million set aside over two years to pay for an estimated 20,000 orthopedic surgeries at Academic Orthopedic Surgical Associates of Ottawa, Richmond Hill’s Schroeder Ambulatory Centre, Toronto’s OV Surgical Centre and Windsor Orthopedic Surgical Centre.
When people talk about the wonders of socialized medicine, they talk as if it were free and as comprehensive as the health care available in the United States.
Neither of these things is true. Although the United States’ health care policies are disastrous in their own ways—particularly with regard to its reliance on third-party payer systems, scammy Pharmacy Benefit Managers, and a highly bureaucratized hybrid public/private system that drives costs through the roof and provides no transparency, the socialized health care systems in most other countries are grossly inferior.
Waiting for the medical care Canadians need has become the national pastime. But unlike America’s pastime — baseball — hanging around for the care you need is not a good way to spend a sunny, summer afternoon even if your have hotdogs and beer.
Enough Canadians to fill up a small city like Lethbridge, AB, or Kamloops, BC, have died on medical waitlists over the past six years.
And yet, governments don’t seem to care enough to actively track the problem.
One in five Canadians say they do not have a family doctor and face health-care challenges as a result, according to a recent survey.
The survey, conducted by Angus Reid in collaboration with the Canadian Cancer Society was released on Nov. 28.
The survey also found that many Canadians who do have a family doctor report it is difficult to get an appointment, waiting at least a week or more to be seen. Survey authors say that is because doctors are taking on too much.
Canadian health care as an idea, and Canadian health care as an institution, exist in two different universes.
Notionally, health care in Canada is single-payer, universal and egalitarian. No one can jump the line. No one can buy better or faster care. Everyone has reasonably timely access to primary and specialist care, and critical issues are treated as true medical emergencies.
A new report is raising alarm over growing wait-list deaths in Canada.
The report from public policy think tank SecondStreet.org revealed that at least 23,746 patients died in Canada while waiting for surgeries or diagnostic procedures between April 2024 and March 2025.
The figures are a three per cent increase from the previous year and push the total number of reported wait-list deaths since 2018 to more than 100,000.
Well so long as some 3rd World flotsam got superior care to a Canadian citizen then I guess that’s all right.
h/t Mauser
About a half a million Canadians left emergency departments before being seen by a doctor in 2024, according to a data analysis by CBC’s Marketplace.
And because B.C. and Quebec report these figures based on the fiscal calendar (and include parts of 2025), that number is likely a lot higher.
The 2024 statistics collected from most provinces and territories show Prince Edward Island had the highest percentage of people leaving, at roughly 14 per cent.
Nearly six in 10 Canadians support reform of the country’s public health-care system, including use of private clinics when patients face delays in receiving timely care, a new survey suggests.
Think tank SecondStreet.org, in partnership with Leger, polled more than 1,600 adults nationwide on five health-care reform options, based on the experiences of other “better-performing” universal health-care systems around the world, including those in Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Australia, Germany, and Japan, said the report detailing the findings.
Millions of Canadians don’t have a family doctor — and it’s not by accident.
Canada’s ongoing doctor shortage was the direct result of government policy decisions made decades ago. In the early 1990s, provincial governments deliberately reduced medical school enrolment and capped residencies, setting the stage for the health-care crisis Canadians face today.
Doctor shortages have reached a critical level in Canada. At last estimate, the country produces 17 new doctors per 100,000 people annually, meaning that millions of people lack access to a regular provider.
Structural factors may be contributing to the physician shortage. Residency slots are limited, some provinces have strict medical licensing requirements that include extra fees and arduous application processes, and practice eligibility requirements can become expensive. The situation is challenging for Canadians who have a passion for medicine but few options other than to seek education, residency spots, and jobs abroad.
Rarely does a day go by that Canadians are not reminded of the shortcomings of their health-care system. It’s normal to see reports of emergency room closures due to a lack of physicians, patients fleeing south or to another province to avoid lengthy delays or people leaving the ER without receiving treatment.
However, while these failures may feel normal to Canadians and might even be considered by some to be the price of universal health care, they are not normal in other universal health-care systems.
We have entered that weird space where any criticism of our healthcare system is countered with accusations of fascism.
Two decades after a watershed report on errors and unintended injuries in Canada’s hospitals shook the health-care sector, tens of thousands of Canadians continue to be harmed during a hospital stay — many of them, multiple times, new data show.
One in 17 hospitalizations in 2024-2025 — representing more than 153,000 people — resulted in someone experiencing a potentially preventable harm such as a drug error, hospital-acquired infection, a “patient accident” like a fall or radiation burn or some other incident serious enough to require treatment or a prolonged stay, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
Immigrant nurses have “mixed” results in the Canadian workforce with more than 60 percent finding employment in their field and roughly a quarter working in lower-skilled occupations or unemployed, a recent government report says.
Approximately 63 percent of immigrants who intended to work as nurses found jobs in nursing occupations in 2021, while 2 percent found jobs in other skilled health occupations, and 13 percent worked in lower-skilled health occupations, such as nurse aides, orderlies, and patient service associates, a joint study conducted by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and Statistics Canada indicates.
