B.C. health-care crisis: Bigger bureaucracy, longer waits and calls for an overhaul

British Columbia's health-care bureaucracy is growing while the front line thins, prompting fresh calls for attention to physician recommendations and even a complete overhaul of the healthcare system.

British Columbia’s health-care bureaucracy is growing while the front line thins, prompting fresh calls for attention to physician recommendations and even a complete overhaul of the healthcare system.

The BC Green Party pointed to the crisis at Surrey Memorial Hospital, and a legal battle between a health authority and an urgent care centre that was too efficient and blew past its meagre diagnostic budget as examples of serious issues that can’t be handle by piecemeal tweaks to the current system. 

“It has become clear that a suite of reforms is required to bring our health-care system out of crisis,” said leader Sonia Furstenau at a press conference Wednesday.

She pointed to a bloated and growing bureaucracy as contributing to the crisis, saying with “64 vice presidents across the health authorities, we have just an absolute multitude of managers and project managers.”

In the first five years of the NDP’s tenure, B.C. saw an increase of nearly 12 per cent in costs for hospital administrators, according to data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information. That’s triple the growth in Alberta (3.6 per cent) but half of Ontario (21.8 per cent).

Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi, the former head of heart surgery at BC Children’s Hospital, pointed out that “Clearly there would be resistance from the inside in reducing the levels of bureaucracy that exist,” but that growing the administrative ranks doesn’t serve patients.

“They're not just not helping them get better,” he said. “They're making it harder to access care and to navigate the system.”