Thank you for your question.
Your analysis of the situation is good. As my colleague from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada mentioned, all the pandemic did was expose pre-existing problems, such as waiting lists.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we saw that cardiology and cardiac surgery patients tended not to access the health care system out of fear of ending up in hospitals. That not only led to all sorts of new complications, but it also revealed that some problems that may have been detected earlier and treated with due care remained unaddressed, on the one hand, owing to limited access to hospital resources and, on the other hand, owing to patients' completely normal concern over being examined in contaminated environments. Those complications have had a number of consequences. One of them is that patients came to hospitals in a worsened condition, a potentially unstable one.
Imagine the situation. We are in the 21st century; we have the treatments, the diagnostics, the doctors and the team, but we do not have the means to receive patients. This clearly adversely impacts their recovery.
Another thing that is really unfortunate is that, if we wait too long, the accumulated backlog will really have undesirable consequences on all patient cohorts. I am preaching for my own parish, but that backlog has not been noted only in the cardiovascular community. It is also in oncology, where patients have received subdiagnoses, their diagnosis was delayed or they received a diagnosis of more advanced diseases.
The situation was urgent before the pandemic, but it is now critically important to adjust the level of funding, potentially in the form of transfers, and to assure us that the rebuilding and resumption of activities start now. We will not be able to cope with this kind of a situation for many more years.
If I may, I will make a comment to echo the comments of some of my colleagues and other witnesses. Planning is crucial for all health teams right now. One of the things we are seeing is that, in some provinces, like mine, the number of surgery residents has dropped by half over the past 10 years. So if someone needs surgery, it will be difficult for them to get treatment.
Like my colleague from the Royal College said, independent, long-term workforce planning, using evidence-based data, is extremely important for the future, not only for doctors, surgeons, and so on, but for all health care professionals.
I will give you an example. We have had a critical shortage of perfusionists for 20 years, and nothing has been done so far. So we are dealing with issues that have been known for two decades without any solutions being adopted.