This Saturday, May 7, 2022, marks the second anniversary of the BC Government’s commitment to surgical renewal.
Surgical renewal is the province's commitment to deliver surgeries that were postponed because of COVID-19, to schedule and deliver surgeries that were not scheduled because of COVID-19, to deliver surgeries fastest to those who need them most, and to change the way surgeries are delivered in BC.
Now in its second year of delivering on this commitment, BC has exceeded its pre-pandemic volume of surgeries.
“Through the dedicated efforts of everyone involved in delivering surgeries and the actions by British Columbians to slow the rapid spread of COVID-19 and ease pressures on our hospitals, over 337,000 surgeries were completed in the 12-month period ending March 31 – the most surgeries ever completed in a single year in BC,” said Adrian Dix, Minister of Health.
“Every surgery is life-changing for the patient who receives it, and that’s why we made our surgical renewal commitment to patients.”
On March 16, 2020, non-urgent scheduled surgeries were postponed because of COVID-19, and on May 18, just two months later, those non-urgent scheduled surgeries resumed.
Since then, additional surgical postponements were caused by subsequent waves of COVID-19, extreme weather and staff illness.
As of March 31, 2022, 99.8% of patients whose scheduled surgeries were postponed during the first wave, and who still wanted to pursue a surgical treatment have had their surgeries.
Respectively, 96.2% of patients in the second and third COVID-19 wave, who had postponed treatments have received care.
Whereas 78.9% of the patients whose scheduled surgeries were postponed because of waves four and five have now accessed treatment.
Other notable renewal achievements in year two include an increase of 17,341 operating-room hours to 586,657 compared to the same timeframe in Year 1 and 13,627 more hours than in 2019-20; completion of training for an additional 400 perioperative nurses and 100 medical-device reprocessing technicians; and a decrease of 11.4% in the total waitlist size compared to the peak waitlist size on May 28, 2020.
“These are significant achievements in fulfilling the commitment,” Dix said.
“But our work is not done. No health-care system that comes through COVID-19 is renewed or restored at the dropping of restrictions, the easing of measures or the flicking of a switch. We know that the impacts of the pandemic were not uniform across the surgical system."
He added, "The work ahead of us now is to build on these achievements, continue to overcome our challenges and find new opportunities to deliver the surgeries patients need.”
