IWK to use private clinic to help tackle wait-list for non-emergency surgeries

Faced with a surgical backlog that isn't getting any shorter, the IWK Health Centre in Halifax will begin doing some surgeries at Scotia Surgery in February as part of a 13-month pilot.

The venture with the Dartmouth, N.S.-based private clinic will receive about $1.2 million through the internal funding of the children's hospital. The bulk of the money will go toward covering additional time for IWK anesthesiologists and IWK surgeons, who will partner with Scotia Surgery nurses to do the work.

During the provincial election, the Progressive Conservatives pledged to expand operating room hours in an attempt to address procedure wait times. Premier Tim Houston told reporters that Thursday's announcement won't do that, but it should help with wait times.

"Every bit of capacity in this province should be mobilized for the benefit of Nova Scotians," he said during a phone briefing.

"We have surgery wait times, we have infrastructure that's available to bring those wait times down, so we're using it."

Longer wait times than other hospitals

Dr. Doug Sinclair, the vice-president of medicine, quality and safety at the IWK, said the hospital has been struggling to overcome its backlog for more than a year.

"Some of this is COVID related, of course," he said in an interview. "But we actually did have a backlog of pediatric surgery even before that."

Compared to other children's hospitals in places such as Ottawa and Vancouver, wait times are about 50 per cent longer for non-emergency surgeries at the IWK, said Sinclair. The hospital subsequently lost 1,000 hours of operating time due to COVID and catching up has been difficult, even operating at full capacity, he said.

"The waiting time, overall, for scheduled surgeries for children before this was sitting at around 11 months. That's a long time when you're a child."

Nursing shortage a challenge

Sinclair stressed that emergency surgeries are happening in a timely way, but he said the hospital needed to get to other surgeries, such as urology, orthopedic, plastic and dental procedures, sooner.

"We're being quite selective in what we're going to do over there because it's an ambulatory setting and we'll do some of the slightly older children."

Dental surgery is an area with some of the longest waits, said Sinclair, because it's difficult to provide services for young children in a typical dental setting.

While there's no issue finding time for surgeons, because they don't normally have operating room time every day, Sinclair said the biggest roadblock to reducing the wait time has been the availability of nurses.

"We have an excellent OR nursing group here at the IWK, but it's a fixed resource. So by using the nursing resource and the booking resource at Scotia Surgery, that just makes a huge difference."

Unions not happy

The Nova Scotia Nurses' Union and Nova Scotia Government & General Employees Union issued a news release Thursday criticizing the move.

The two unions, which represent thousands of nurses and other health-care workers in the province, called the announcement a "Band-Aid solution" when what is needed is increased staffing.

The premier has previously guaranteed a job for every Nova Scotia nursing graduate during the next five years.

Sinclair said the partnership with Scotia Surgery would be evaluated after 13 months to determine what happens next. In the meantime, he said, the hospital is also working toward capital improvements in its own operating rooms and finding ways to increase staffing levels.

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