Among the many signs of deterioration in our provincial health-care system, the latest, and perhaps most alarming, is what’s happening in cancer care.
B.C. once had a leading position in this field. Our breast cancer survival rates were among the best in North America.
But the evidence of decline is all around us.
According to the B.C. Radiology Society, hundreds of thousands of British Columbians are waiting for medical imaging, including mammograms and screening ultrasounds.
In a letter to Health Minister Adrian Dix, the society warned of a “tsunami of cancer cases — including those initially detected at stage II and above — that may be coming because of delayed access to medical imaging.”
Reinforcing this concern, B.C.’s wait times for cancer radiation are the worst in Canada. Across most of the country, between 98 and 100 per cent of patients receive radiation treatment within the recommended wait time of four weeks.
The figure in B.C. is 88 per cent.
Whatever the cause of this poor performance, it cannot be blamed on the COVID-19 outbreak. Ontario and Quebec were much harder hit than B.C., yet their numbers are far superior — 98 per cent of patients in Ontario receive radiation treatment on time, and 99 per cent in Quebec.
In any context, those B.C. figures are alarming. Coupled with the crisis that has overtaken family medicine, they add weight to the concern that something has gone terribly wrong with just about every aspect of our health-care system.
Indeed, the situation, in many respects, resembles the pre-medicare era, when patients were left largely to their own devices and many could not find, or afford, care.
When the provincial legislature began its fall sitting two weeks ago, B.C. Liberal members were quick to put the blame on Dix. And yes, some of the fault can be laid at his door.
Why, for example, has the minister only now permitted pharmacists to renew some prescriptions, when Alberta adopted this practice 15 years ago?
But it’s clear, from the sheer breadth of the decay, that the foundations of the system itself are crumbling.
This is not due to any one minister or government. The stewardship of our health-care system rests in the hands of several stakeholders.
One of these is the College of Physicians and Surgeons. What has the college to say about the deterioration of the system it helps oversee? Nothing useful.
Another is Doctors of B.C., the representative body for physicians. What does this association offer? Little more than repeat demands for money.
Much the same can be said of the College of Nursing.
And what of the federal government? Medicare was introduced by act of Parliament.
Critically, that legislation was accompanied by a promise that henceforward Ottawa would pay half the cost.
Yet a succession of federal governments have reneged on that commitment.
Collectively, these stakeholders are supposed to be the guarantors of our health-care system.
It is up to each of them, individually and collectively, to put aside self-interest and deal with the crisis at hand.
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