You raise a good point.
I'll give you a brief overview of what we are dealing with at the clinical level.
Patients have been broken down into four priority categories. Category one—sometimes called P1—patients have to be seen the same day; in other words, they are emergency cases. P2 patients have to be seen within a week.
Disaster strikes when we are dealing with P3 patients, who are supposed to be seen within a month. An example of a P3 case would be someone with unspecified abdominal pain. It's important to find out what it is. Nearly 90% of those types of cases turn out not to be serious, but 10% can be linked to cancer. Even though P3 patients are supposed to be seen within a month, the current wait time is three to six months.
An example of a P4 case would be someone waiting for an orthopaedic surgery, a hip or knee replacement. Normally, those patients are seen within three months, but the current wait time is almost a year, sometimes more. Patients who are waiting for surgery cannot work and they suffer in pain. They do not have access to the treatment they need. What's worse, they sometimes have to be examined over again because too much time has elapsed since the diagnosis, so they have to go through two examinations.