Cancer Treatment Wait Times Drop In Ontario
Posted January 26, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A provincial health organization delivered some good news for those enduring the agonizing wait for cancer care.
Wait times for radiation treatments have dropped for the third straight year. Cancer Care Ontario said in a report released Friday that there’s been a 33 percent reduction in the delays since 2003.
The average time a person waited from when they met an oncologist to the start of treatment has fallen about two weeks since 2003 to 4.3 weeks, down from 6.4 weeks.
Although there wasn’t a reduction, chemotherapy and cancer surgery wait times have remained stable over the same period even though there have been increases in demand for those procedures.
Eighty-nine percent of cancer surgeries are performed within 84 days of referral, the report states, putting the province well in line with its own target of 90 percent. But there is room for improvement as delays for lung, brain and gynecological cancer surgeries are on the rise.
The wait for chemotherapy treatments has levelled off at around five weeks, down from 5.4 in 2003.
“All cancer treatment wait times are either going down or are stabilized in Ontario and waits for radiation therapy have fallen dramatically,” Dr. Kerry Sullivan of Cancer Care Ontario explained.
“… This is a magnificent turnaround from the situation less than a decade ago.”
Cancer Care Ontario is crediting the drop in wait times to the purchase of new machines over the last year and a half and new incentives for radiation technicians.
The province’s tough anti- smoking campaign has also been praised as well as Ontario’s colorectal cancer screening program – the first in Canada.
The organization also released some startling statistics about cancer rates, saying that 45 percent of Canadian men and 40 percent of Canadian women are expected to acquire the illness over their lifetimes.
“I had a very large tumour. It was stage three and when there are only four stages, stage three cancer is not good news,” cancer patient Virginia Flintoft said.
She was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2005 and couldn’t agree more that there are still improvements that need to be made. It took her seven months to get a colonoscopy.
“Perhaps my stage would’ve been stage two instead of stage three,”
While this report may be a feather in the Liberals’ cap, Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory was quick to point out the hospital bed shortage across the province, which has led to heavy delays in emergency rooms.
“Part of the reason they tell me in hospital after hospital while people are lying in stretchers in emergency rooms and in hallways in pain is because there are beds closed upstairs, in the very same hospitals which Mr. McGuinty and his government refused to fund,” the Opposition leader said.
“The hospitals tell me that if those beds were funded, even on a transitional basis, they would have a degree of flexibility they badly need right now, and it would help to alleviate some of this crisis.”
To read the full report, click here.
And to find out what wait times are like in hospitals near you, click here.
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