Burnaby Hospital could cost Fraser Health more than $620,000 in fines for making people wait more than a year for surgery.
Under provincial legislation, health authorities are penalized financially for patients who spend more than 52 weeks on a wait list.
Fraser Health faces up to $2.5 million in fines for wait times at hospitals across the region, but only Surrey Memorial (at about $780,000) could cost the health authority more than Burnaby.
In a bid to avoid the penalties, Fraser Health officials sent surgeons across the region a memo Nov. 4, telling them to reassess patients who have waited more than 40 weeks.
“There still remains a volume of patients whose bookings are causing financial penalty. It is imperative for the interest of all, including our patients, that we use every available strategy to avoid penalties,” stated the memo, signed by Fraser Health executive director Judith Hockney and director of surgery Dr. Peter Blair.
The notice was leaked to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, which accused the health authority Thursday of trying to find a loophole to avoid the fines.
“It’s bad enough these people are being forced to wait a year for surgery, but now Fraser Health wants to play games with their wait times,” said the federation’s B.C. director Jordan Bateman. “Dragging these people around and around the system as a loophole to avoid financial discipline is ludicrous.”
Bateman said there was no medical reason for the reassessments and suggested they were meant to pause or reset wait times for long-delayed cases.
Blair said that wasn’t true.
“This process does not impact the patient’s wait time on the wait list,” Blair said in a email statement to the NOW. “It does not reset the patient or put them back to zero. The goal is to improve patient care and timely delivery of surgery.”
But longtime local doctor David Jones, who spent six years as medical director at Burnaby Hospital, said the reassessments would do little to cut wait lists besides clearing people off who had died, moved away or changed their minds about surgery during their 40-week wait.
“Those kind of scenarios are probably relatively rare,” he told the NOW. “It’s not going to make a dent in the waiting lists we see and the statistics that have come out.”
To cut wait times, Jones said, Fraser Health needs to put more money into Burnaby Hospital’s operating room budget, which he called “woefully inadequate.”
He said the problem isn’t new, as the hospital has never had the funding to open all 10 of its ORs.
“The rooms are there but we’ve got to have the staff and nurses and equipment to be able to do more surgeries,” he said.
As of Oct. 9, 143 people scheduled for surgery at Burnaby Hospital had spent more than a year on waitlists, and another 1,004 had waited between six and 12 months.
Under the province's pay-for-performance system, every patient who waits more than a year costs the health authority $1,400 in additional funding from the province.
