In November, Alberta Health staff walked into a restaurant in Calgary and noticed a number of health violations — the dishwasher wasn’t properly sanitized, a can of tomato paste had mould growing on it and some cleaning cloths were laying on the floor, to name a few.
CALGARY HERALD COLUMN: Alberta Health takes wrong turn on waiting list deaths
The inspection report for the visit, complete with the company’s name and address, was then posted online, where it will remain for all to see for the next three years. Disclosure of these reports is a common practice across Canada — some governments even require restaurants to post notices of health violations in their windows for customers to see on their way in.
Clearly, governments like to set the bar quite high for private businesses when it comes to health and safety violations. But what about when governments make a mistake?
Alberta Health just took the already low bar it set for itself and eliminated it altogether. Poof. Gone. Who needs accountability anyway?
The issue concerns Alberta Health’s decision to stop collecting data on patients dying while waiting for surgery and diagnostic scans. The government used to collect partial data. Now, it has decided to stop tracking the important metric altogether — unlike most other health bodies in Canada.
Since 2019, SecondStreet.org has been filing information requests with health bodies across Canada to track data on patients dying while waiting for treatment. It’s an important issue to research for many reasons, not the least of which is that a patient dying because the government took too long to provide treatment is the ultimate failure of a health-care system.
We began researching this problem because there have been many reported cases of such incidents in Canada. This includes Alberta patient Jerry Dunham, who died in 2020 while waiting for a pacemaker to be implanted. Jerry left behind two young daughters.
Alberta Health noted that the data previously collected was incomplete, as staff were never trained provincewide to carefully track the information. It just happened to be collected here and there through wait list management software. But at least it was something.
Last year in Alberta, the data showed 61 patients died while waiting for surgery. A further 179 died while waiting for a diagnostic scan. In the past, when a breakdown of the procedures was provided, the overwhelming majority were non-life-saving treatments such as cataract procedures and hip operations.
A patient is unlikely to die from not receiving their hip operation in time, but it certainly does affect someone’s quality of life in their final years. Waiting for a hip operation in and of itself may not kill you, but adapting a sedentary lifestyle while you wait for surgery just might — a lack of exercise can make health problems worse.
This year, when SecondStreet.org asked for the latest data, Alberta Health officials indicated that they “no longer have this information.” Alberta Health Services confirmed they don’t have the data either. Instead of improving the situation, the problem has gotten worse.
For leadership in this area, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange and Premier Danielle Smith should look to Nova Scotia.
The small Atlantic province responds to our information requests each year with a detailed spreadsheet that notes the surgery that each patient was waiting for when they died, when they were put on the waiting list, how long they waited, the procedure’s target surgical time and days past the target. If the procedure was previously cancelled, the reason for that is also provided.
The Nova Scotia government also provides additional context. Last year, it noted 532 patients died while waiting for surgery. Of those patients, the data shows 50 were waiting for procedures that could have potentially saved their life, 38 per cent of whom died after waiting longer than the maximum recommended wait time.
Tracking and releasing the data in the same manner that Nova Scotia does would be a step in the right direction. Proactively disclosing the data on the government’s website would be an even better step.
And if the Alberta government really wants to be a leader, it could start posting notices in hospital windows letting patients know if delays at that hospital have cost any patients their lives.
If governments want to set the bar high for others, then they should meet it, too.
Colin Craig is the president of SecondStreet.org, a Canadian think-tank.
This column was originally published in The Calgary Herald on January 4, 2025.
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