Eight Patients Die In Manitoba While Waiting For Heart Surgery

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SecondStreet.org recently obtained new data about patients in Manitoba dying while waiting for heart surgery.

The data brought to mind an interesting question –

Why does the Manitoba government disclose more details about renovations to private pizza restaurants than the government discloses about patients who die while waiting for surgery?

Here’s a bit of background and the data we acquired…

BACKGROUND:

In 2019, the CBC ran a story about echocardiogram wait times:

Manitoba: 70 weeks
Saskatchewan: 1 week

Just imagine having to wait over a year for such an important test.

According to the Mayo Clinic, timely echocardiograms are important as they can detect heart disease, congenital heart defects and problems with valves or chambers in the heart.

So, what would happen if someone had to wait too long to identify a problem and died prematurely because of it?

Stories like this contributed to SecondStreet.org’s decision to conduct national research into just how many patients die each year in Canada while waiting for surgery and diagnostic scans. We subsequently gathered data from hospitals and health regions nation-wide and released two Died on a waiting list reports – one in December 2020 and one in June 2021.

Unfortunately, we didn’t receive any data from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA) … until recently.

WRHA DATA

The data we obtained from the WRHA only covers patients who died while waiting for cardiac cases (click here to view). Here is a summary:

• Eight patients died between April 2019 and April 2021 while waiting for cardiac surgery;
• Two of the patients waited more than 120 days for surgery – one waited longer than the maximum recommended time period;
• For three of the patient deaths, no maximum recommended wait time was identified; and
• The WRHA wasn’t able to tell us the scheduled surgical dates for the eight patients – there may not have even been scheduled dates.

Did any of the patients die because they waited so long for an echocardiogram?

Did any die because they waited too long for surgery?

What about patients who died while waiting for other surgeries and diagnostic scans?

Isn’t this important information to know and disclose?

THE DOUBLE STANDARD

Consider what the Manitoba government discloses about businesses who don’t properly follow government rules.

In 2019, the Manitoba government shut down the Wood Fired Pizza restaurant in Brandon and disclosed the following:

“Extensively remodel[ing] a food handling establishment without first registering.”

The government disclosed the name of the business and reason for shutting it down. Readers can envision what occurred – the business did a large renovation project and didn’t get the government’s nod of approval before selling food to the public.

That seems fairly minor compared to a patient dying while waiting for surgery from the government, doesn’t it?

Details around serious incidents in the health care system are less forthcoming.

Since 2006, Manitoba has required “critical incident reports” to be created when “health services are provided to an individual and results in a consequence to him or her that is serious and undesired.”

For example, between July 1, 2019 and September 30, 2019, a patient passed away in Manitoba and the following critical incident information was disclosed:

“There was a delay in recognition of acute changes to diagnostic information leading to a missed opportunity for earlier intervention.”

This tells readers and researchers very little about what happened.

How long was the delay? What was the acute change to diagnostic information? The short blurb suggests the patient died because of the mistake … was anyone held accountable? Which health facility was responsible? What changed as a result?

In total, there were 15 deaths reported with “critical incidents” in the province of Manitoba during the three-month period.

Understandably, some parts of a patient’s adverse health experience cannot be shared publicly in order to protect the patient’s identity.

But there is lots of room for improvement when it comes to tracking and disclosing data pertaining to patients dying while waiting for surgery and diagnostic scans – and critical incident reports.

As our Died on a waiting list reports show, many other health regions do a much better job when it comes to tracking these details (click here to see what Nova Scotia provided).

As it stands right now, the Manitoba government discloses more info about pizza restaurants that don’t register their renovations than what health regions are required to track and disclose about patients dying while waiting for care.

Colin Craig is the President of SecondStreet.org