Waiting longer, getting sicker: Cardiologists reveal ballooning waits for surgery in B.C.

The province's cardiologists are revealing that virtually every patient waiting for a scheduled heart surgery in British Columbia is waiting beyond their federally recommended wait time to go under the knife. That means patients are getting sicker and needing emergency care more often.

The province's cardiologists are revealing that virtually every patient waiting for a scheduled heart surgery in British Columbia is waiting beyond their federally recommended wait time to go under the knife. That means patients are getting sicker and needing emergency care more often.

All cardiac surgery patients begin their immediate recovery in intensive care units, but with a flood of COVID-19 patients starting with the Delta wave last summer and continuing with the Omicron wave late last year, only the most serious of heart patients have had surgery. 

"In the past, it's been patients that were relatively elective that were waiting, but now even relatively urgent patients that should be going quickly are seeing that their wait times are increasing and are also exceeding their recommended wait times," explained Dr. Daniel Wong, head of surgery for the Doctors of B.C.

“Say there's only four spots on the lifeboat, you have to take the four people that you can and there's many others waiting and it's becoming more and more challenging to find out who's the highest priority when everyone’s high priority.”

Wong says while urgent bypass surgeries have continued essentially uninterrupted, there are approximately 400 patients waiting for a scheduled open-heart surgery. Of those, 58 per cent are exceeding the recommended wait time for the major procedure.

There are many other categories of heart surgery, as well, each with different priority levels and acceptable wait times. The vast majority of patients in each group are exceeding their recommended wait times, and they’re all waiting roughly twice as long as they used to before the Delta wave, according to Wong.

“It’s unprecedented,” said Wong. “There were very few people who waited beyond the recommended wait time before and now it's starting to become a huge number."