Thank you very much.
Good morning ladies and gentleman. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak here today.
I am a pediatric neurosurgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children. I am surgeon in chief there and also chair of the Pediatric Surgical Chiefs of Canada.
I'm extremely proud of the fact that the Hospital for Sick Children was last year ranked number one and this year ranked number two in the world by Newsweek magazine, but to be honest, SickKids is struggling.
I'm here to talk to you today about the issues about children accessing scheduled surgical care, which I think is in a crisis across Canada.
As you know, children have time-sensitive developments, which are adversely affected by delay. I've including in the briefing four common conditions, which are strabismus, undescended testicles, orthopaedic deformity and hearing impairment. These lead to lifelong issues of blindness, infertility, chronic pain and disability, and impaired speech development, as a few examples.
We are using every possible resource we can to try to address this issue, but for many hospitals such as SickKids, our wait-list actually continues to grow. The barriers we face are pediatric human health resources, underfunding, lack of operating room space and a regional approach to pediatric surgical care.
Like the other speakers who have been here, we see some of the solutions to be national support for pediatric health care, including surgery, and making it an absolute top priority; national specialized human health resource recruitment and training for nursing, allied health professionals and physicians; and adequate funding models that reflect the complexity of pediatric surgical, anaesthetic and hospital care.
You can imagine the difference between wheeling a 30-year-old patient in for hernia repair and a two-year-old when faced with a large room full of surgical equipment, masked individuals and large needles. Caring for children is very different from caring for adults. As you'll see, the wait-list for children is at or greater than that for adults.
In the brief, I provided some appendices, which I will refer to now.
The first one shows the surgical wait-list for SickKids over the last three years. Because of the pandemic and the current resources we're facing, we have a 150% increase in our surgical wait-list over the last five years. At the moment, 60% of our patients are scheduled beyond the ideal date for their surgery. This has increased dramatically since the beginning of the pandemic.
In appendix 2, the distribution of cases by surgical speciality is listed. You will see, for example, that urology has 2,000 patients on the wait-list at SickKids who are beyond their ideal treatment time.
Like in the adult sectors, our biggest waits are in orthopaedic surgery, plastic surgery, and ear, nose and throat surgery.
We are part of a region. I've shown here in appendix 3 the data around the surgical wait-list in the greater Toronto area. You'll see that the Toronto region has over 4,000 patients who are out-of-window, awaiting surgery. It equals that of the other largest groups of adults, including orthopaedic surgery and ophthalmology. This is not a minor problem for pediatric patients.
In appendix 4, I've listed the self-reported wait-lists by pediatric hospitals across Canada. This does not represent all of the hospitals. This is self-reported information. Nevertheless, as I have shown, there are 21,000 children within these eight hospitals who are on surgical wait-lists. Half of them are beyond the ideal treatment time.
Finally, just to illustrate the impact of the pandemic on children, I have shown CIHI data up to December 2021 in appendix 5. The delay in surgery for children is greater than that for those who are either middle-aged or older adults.
I cannot emphasize to you enough the impact that the delay in access to surgical care is having on children across Canada.
Thank you.