Alberta took the next step towards completing an eye surgery blitz it first announced in May.
The province has completed contracts with service providers in Edmonton and Calgary to perform an extra 1,400 cataract surgeries and up to 120 corneal transplants by mid-October. Aimed at reducing wait times, the blitz will cost $2 million.
Surgical blitzes are more commonly done near the end of a fiscal year when the province’s finances become clear, but savings realized from consolidating the health regions along with a funding boost to Alberta Health Services this year are allowing Alberta to roll out blitzes throughout the year, said Health and Wellness Minister Gene Zwozdesky.
“We’re now able to do better planning and longer range planning. At the same time we’re able to do some catch up in some of the more priority, pressure areas,” he said.
Eye surgeons each maintain their own wait list, so wait times vary, he said. Current waits generally range from one month to nine or 10 months, Zwozdesky said.
The province put out the call in May for service providers to respond to an expression of interest. The process closed June 3.
Most of the additional surgeries — 1,000 — will be done in Calgary where wait-lists are the longest. Another 300 will be performed at non-hospital surgical facilities in Edmonton and 100 at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton.
Previous blitzes have reduced wait times by about a month, on average, estimated Dr. Gary Chornell, a St. Albert eye doctor who is the executive director of the Ophthalmological Society of Alberta. He said it’s too soon to predict the impact of this latest initiative.
“I don’t think we’ll know where we are until the late fall,” he said. “It can’t help but make a noticeable difference by the time October and November rolls around.”
The Canadian wait time benchmark is 12 weeks for cataract surgery, he said. Demand for the service in Alberta is “ever increasing” due to its aging population so it’s a positive step that the government has committed to five years of predictable funding to Alberta Health Services.
“As long as I’ve been doing this I can never remember any minister of health committing to a five-year funding program. That’s outstanding,” Chornell said.
In February AHS launched an $8 million surgical blitz that resulted in an additional 2,250 surgeries and 3,600 additional MRI and CT scans.
Eye surgeries are just the first phase of the second blitz, with plans under way to do another round of various surgeries, including heart, urological, gynecological, hips and knees, Zwozdesky said.
