Surgeons at Burnaby Hospital have lost confidence with the management of Fraser Health surgical services, according to a recent letter signed by 18 of the hospital’s surgeons.
The missive is addressed to Fraser Health surgery director Dr. Peter Blair and was made public by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation of B.C. Wednesday.
The surgeons called on Blair to reverse a recent Fraser Health decision that requires patients who have waited 40 weeks or more for surgery to be reassessed by their surgeon’s office.
The plan was instituted to reduce wait times and avoid the loss of pay-for-performance funding from the province, but the doctors called it a “meaningless make-work project.”
The letter accuses the health authority of using the reassessments as a way to “re-direct the surgeon’s time away from seeing new patients and thereby decreasing the influx of new bookings for surgery.”
Burnaby Hospital is poised to cost Fraser Health $620,000 in lost pay-for-performance funding from the province for patients who spent more than a year waiting for surgery.
As of Oct. 9, 143 people scheduled for surgery at Burnaby Hospital fit that bill, and another 1,004 had waited between six and 12 months.
Under the province's pay-for-performance system, every patient who waits more than a year costs the health authority $1,400.
The 18 Burnaby Hospital surgeons put the blame for the costly waitlists squarely on the health authority’s shoulders.
They said the hospital gets only half the operating room funding of Surrey Memorial, and Burnaby has only enough money to open six of its 10 operating rooms.
“We, the surgeons of BH, have repetitively documented the lack of resources that FHA provides to BH as compared to its other acute care sites,” states the letter. “It is obvious that the only way that the surgeons of BH can reduce their waiting lists is by having access to more operating room time to do the surgery.”
They could be getting just that, according to Blair, who told the NOW that the health authority could open another operating room at Burnaby Hospital by the end of January.
He said Fraser Health has taken a close look in the last couple weeks at different funding models that consider the capacity of sites to deal with their collective waitlists.
A decision about whether Burnaby Hospital needs more OR resources should be made before Christmas, according to Blair.
“If we do decide that they need extra funding for more capacity it will probably take us until the end of January to get it up and running,” he said.
While comparing Burnaby’s OR budget with RCH’s or Surrey Memorial’s is pointless, according to Blair, because the latter are regional hospitals and need bigger budgets, he said local surgeons could be right about needing more operating room resources.
The health authority just wants to make sure funding decisions are based on hard data.
“We don’t know essentially,” he said. “We’re trying to find that out, but we need to do it with data. We can’t listen to the surgeons and just hand them more money.”
In the meantime, Blair said, surgeons need to do their part to move wait lists along, and the reassessments of patients who have waited more than 40 weeks is part of that.
“It’s not a make-work project,” he said. “It’s not something we’re doing to avoid funding issues. It’s something we’re doing on behalf of the patients.”
