Half of Canadians have avoided hospitals because of wait times: poll - National Post
Patients wait in beds along a hallway at the emergency department in an Ontario hospital. Canadian emergency departments are reporting historic wait times, a recent report found. Photo by Dan Janisse/The Windsor Star/Postmedia/FileArticle contentHalf of Canadians have avoided hospitals because of long waits and more than 25 per cent said they have turned to the private system for care, according to a new poll.
Most Canadians say health services where they live need to change — 58 per cent believe the system needs to change in a major way — and 61 per cent are open to allowing people to pay for surgery at private clinics if the public system can’t deliver timely care, the survey found.
“Canadians are very OK with the idea of more private health services being used,” said Renaud Brossard, vice-president of communications at the Montreal Economic Institute, or MEI.
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“They see it as a safety valve” rather than simply being added to months-long waiting lists for publicly funded care, he said.
The new Leger poll, jointly commissioned by the MEI, SecondStreet.org and the Canadian Constitution Foundation, found many Canadians are avoiding seeking medical attention because of wait times.
“When people avoid seeking medical attention for a health issue, it doesn’t just magically go away,” SecondStreet.org president Colin Craig said in a news release.
Only 10 per cent of those polled believe the health-care system doesn’t need to change and “just needs more public funding.”
By contrast, 84 per cent said health services where they live require some degree of change: 58 per cent said major change and 26 per cent said minor.
The poll didn’t ask what people specifically believed needed changing. However, “people recognize it’s not just a matter of funding,” Brossard said.
“What we typically hear is, ‘If we were just able to properly fund the health system, everything would be OK.’ It’s what we’ve been hearing for 40, 50 years,” he said.
