Ontario to Fund 60,000 Endoscopies via Private Clinics

Medical tools are seen in an exam room at a health clinic in Calgary on July 14, 2023. The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh

The Ontario government is hoping to reduce wait times for gastrointestinal endoscopies by funding 60,000 procedures at private community clinics.

A 10-week window to submit licence applications has been announced by the province with approvals scheduled for issue in early 2025. Endoscopies include various tests to view body organs, such as a colonoscopy for examining the colon.

The expansion of services is expected to reduce wait times for gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy procedures across the province from the time the order or requisition is submitted until the patients undergo their procedures, Health Minister Sylvia Jones said in an Aug. 26 press release.

“When it comes to wait times for surgeries and procedures, the status quo is not acceptable,” Jones said. “Increasing access to GI endoscopy procedures will help improve rapid access to diagnostic care for early disease detection when and where people need it.”

The latest announcement is part of the province’s Your Health strategy, but builds on the plan announced by the Ontario government in 2022 to increase the number of surgeries at private clinics covered by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) in a bid to shorten waitlists.

The Your Health plan focuses on increasing access to services in health care settings near the patients who need them, Jones said. In a statement on the Your Health website she noted that the province would look to other provinces and countries for inspiration in health-care reform but that Ontarians would “always access the health care they need with their OHIP card, never their credit card.”

Also part of the program was the government’s recent call for applications to boost the availability of MRI and CT scans by 100,000 province-wide. The statement said 49 new MRI machines have been installed in 42 Ontario hospitals thus far.

A third call will be launched this fall to expand access to orthopedic surgeries, the province said.

A similar program trialed in Saskatchewan that relied heavily on private clinics is a potential model to address the ongoing issue of long health-care wait times in Canada, according to one study.

Although no longer in play, the Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative (SSI) addressed escalating medical wait times by using private clinics for essential non-emergency surgical procedures such as knee and hip replacements.

The program was key to reducing Saskatchewan’s surgical wait times by 47 percent between 2010 and 2014, the study from the Fraser Institute found. There was also a nearly 75 percent reduction in the number of patients waiting for surgery for more than three months.

The SSI program worked by compiling referrals province-wide to more efficiently pair patients with available specialists as well as by using private clinics to carry out publicly funded procedures. Over the five-year period the SSI was in place, the average medical wait time from when a patient was referred by their family physician to a specialist to when the treatment was completed fell by 47 percent to 14.2 weeks.

“The success of the Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative offers valuable lessons for policymakers across Canada—and hope for patients—that the unacceptably long waits that plague health-care systems nationwide can be reduced meaningfully,” Fraser Institute senior fellow Nadeem Esmail said in a May 30 press release. “Saskatchewan’s experience with the SSI suggests that publicly-funded surgeries outsourced to private clinics can serve as a beneficial first step on the road to reform.”