Province touts elimination of pandemic backlog for ultrasounds, critics suggest wait times still 'too long'

The Manitoba government suggests a backlog of ultrasound tests that piled up due to pandemic disruptions has been whittled away thanks to a variety of initiatives, while the Opposition and a union that represents ultrasound workers question whether the celebration is premature.

An ultrasound backlog of 612 patients in October was eliminated by the following month last fall due to a "multi-pronged approach to build capacity" in the system, according to a provincial news release out Friday afternoon.

"The diagnostic and surgical recovery task force is producing results that ensure Manitobans can get the care they need, when they need it," Manitoba Health Minister Audrey Gordon said in a statement. 

The pandemic backlog volume of patients waiting on ultrasound tests shrank from 4,500 in February of 2022 to zero by November last year, according to the task force backlog dashboard.

The data also suggests the province completed nearly 19,100 ultrasounds in November, compared to almost 17,500 in November 2019.

The task force was struck early last year to brainstorm ways to cut down wait times and improve access to a range of procedures. The task force dashboard, rolled out late last year, shows progress on wait times for several procedures.

The formation of that task force followed months of calls from physician advocacy group Doctors Manitoba for the province to prioritize the issue, as health outcomes generally face a greater risk of worsening the longer a patient waits for care.

Gordon went on to say the median wait time for the imaging tests is now shorter than it was in 2019, before COVID-19 caused widespread surgery, diagnostic and test cancellations. 

Manitobans waited nine weeks for ultrasound tests in November of that year, compared to seven weeks in November 2022, according to median wait times on the provincial dashboard.

That's actually marginally longer — by one week — than patients waited in October of last fall, and about the same as November 2021 when the median wait time was also seven weeks.

Gordon says more than a third of ultrasound sites are meeting the wait time target of 8½ weeks. That suggests nearly two-thirds are still missing that mark, said the union that represents sonographers, the diagnostic imaging technologists that perform ultrasounds.

Jason Linklater, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, said that benchmark is "already way too long to wait for this critical test."

He suggested the median wait times reported by the province don't reflect wait times in places outside of Winnipeg. Some patients in Thompson are waiting 28 weeks for an ultrasound right now, he said.

"Manitoba is facing more and more demand for these and other tests, and we are concerned that our province doesn't have the capacity to meet it going forward," Linklater said in a statement.

"Government still hasn't put significant resources into boosting our diagnostic capacity, and the current system is unsustainable. They can't keep expecting the same number of specialized technologists to do more and more."

Uzoma Asagwara, MLA for Union Station and the New Democrat's health critic, echoed some of Linklater's concerns about ultrasound wait times in rural and northern communities.

"I am hesitant to take their announcements at face value because we've seen consistently that they are short on details and then when you look into the details of the matter, it turns out that it's in fact not the whole story," said Asagwara, formerly a registered psychiatric nurse.

"Thousands of Manitobans are having worse health outcomes or requiring more complex health interventions because they had to wait so long."