You're absolutely right. There have always been backlogs in the health care system for both adults and pediatrics that go back for decades, and in most pediatric centres, around 20% or 30% of the patients were beyond their recommended treatment. The pandemic had a major hit on these backlogs because, as the CIHI data has shown, there are 600,000 procedures that have not been completed compared to how we were doing before. That's an enormous number of surgeries. They accumulated because the hospitals were shut down, and it took a long time to ramp up, and now many hospitals can't get back up to 100% because of the current health human resource issues.
I think every hospital has experienced this differently. We're 150% above where we were prior to the pandemic. There are always going to be patients on waiting lists. That's to be expected, but the idea is to get as many of them as possible treated before this recommended date.
All I can say now is that it seems to everybody that this is out of control. We have teenagers waiting for spine surgery who wait two to three years for their operation while their spinal curvatures increase. We have other patients who are limping around with a dislocated hip who can't have their hip repaired because we can't bring them into hospital.
What seemed to be not ideal but manageable has become, I think, a crisis. To deal with this problem, we have to increase our volumes well beyond what we did before, because of this backlog. That is the struggle. How do we do that when we are limited by the number of personnel, the number of operating rooms we have, and honestly, pushing the health care workers who have been phenomenal during this two and a half year period. They're tired. They're burnt out, and yet we're asking more and more from them. That's our problem.