According to two local doctors, the Whitehorse General Hospital’s operating rooms are running the same today as they were before the Yukon Hospital Corporation and the Yukon government announced expanded surgical hours starting Sept. 9.
That means no more surgeries are being done this week compared to previous weeks, according to the two doctors the News spoke with.
That’s despite the authorities' claims, reported in the News, that the Whitehorse General Hospital is adding surgical hours to meet growing needs and improve timely access to surgical services.
Dr. Alex Poole is a surgeon at the Whitehorse hospital and former head of the Yukon Medical Association. He sits on the board of directors for the Canadian Medical Association, according to the association's website.
“Were they so desperate for a good news story that they embellished it a little bit? I don't know. Maybe it wasn't intentional, but yeah, factually, it's incorrect,” Poole said.
No one from the hospital corporation or the government was made available for interview.
Yukon government cabinet communications left it to the hospital corporation to explain, since it’s their undertaking, with money from the government.
James Low, a spokesperson for the hospital corporation, said in an email statement that “there is likely little value in debating the differing opinions of the facts because we all agree that there is an urgent need to support surgical services today and in the longer term.”
He stood by the notion that surgical services are going up year over year with an eight per cent increase projected for 2024-25 compared to the previous year.
“The funding from the Government of Yukon offers needed resources to better support this need. To put it another way, we’ve been able to resource more hours on the schedule. That is a fact. This is a more sustainable way to support the service today,” Low said.
“What (it) likely comes down to is that we may be talking about different things.”
Low said they all agree on the need for sustainable services while moving forward on long-term initiatives to “address hospital bed capacity and redevelop surgical services facilities to current standards.”
An online update from the Yukon Hospital Corporation posted Sept. 9 draws attention to formally adding surgical hours to meet record-setting projections: 4,400 projected surgeries this year alone, which the corporation says is more than in any previous year.
"This is part of a continued year-over-year increase of the number of procedures performed in territory. By extending our surgical hours, this better positions the hospital to address increasing demands and improve patient care,” reads the hospital’s update.
In support of increase surgical hours, the hospital corporation states that it has added full-time nurses and technicians, a move that it says reduces reliance on temporary agency staff.
The Yukon government issued a Sept. 12 press release that notes in the title surgical services have gone up with Yukon government support.
"Using core funding provided in Budget 2024-25 to add staff and extend surgical hours, Whitehorse General Hospital recently optimized operations to support a projected 4,400 surgeries this year alone. This is designed to shorten wait times and improve Yukoners’ ability to receive critical care in a timely fashion without needing to leave the territory,” reads the government press release.
The release claims the Yukon government support has enabled the Yukon Hospital Corporation to increase its capacity to do more surgeries. It says the changes making this possible include systems improvements and nurse and technician recruitment. The release adds that more available healthcare professionals and extended surgical hours will help take pressure off the hospital's capacity.
However, Poole said there has been no actual increase in operating time.
No doctors have been added to the roster to perform any additional hours of surgery, per the doctors.
“What I would really like is for this story to be true, that there would be increased operating time. That's an aspirational idea. I think that maybe that the press release was too aspirational in that that's not what's currently going on,” Poole said.
“Why don't we just all work on making this an actual true story that there is an increased operating capacity in the Yukon so we can do more operations?”
Dr. Alex Kmet is president of the Yukon Medical Association.
Kmet said the operating room slate looks similar week over week; this week doesn’t look substantially different compared to last week or the week before that. Year after year, surgical volume continues to increase with an aging, growing population, as expected, he said.
“What I understand those announcements refer to is that there have been resources that enable us to continue the status quo, most notably in supporting my nursing colleagues so that they have more redundancy and burnout is less likely to happen in them,” Kmet said.
“But from a day-to-day operations point of view, the way things are being scheduled today is the same way they were being scheduled a month ago.”
Kmet said the schedule is limited given there are only two main operating rooms and a third, smaller room typically used for diagnostic and non-invasive therapeutics that don’t require general anesthesia.
“There's no way we're going to make any meaningful difference without there being a massive investment in the infrastructure, and that's across the board in the surgical services and hospital space,” Kmet said.
Kmet added that it could cost hundreds of millions of dollars in adding physical space including more beds and more operating rooms as well as more staff.
Wait times for joint replacement surgeries in the Yukon are below the Canadian Institute for Health Information’s benchmark, Kmet noted.
“People suffer while they wait,” Kmet said. He referred to people waiting for a new knee or hip.
“They're not doing the activities that they want or could be doing, and it's usually very uncomfortable, very painful,” Kmet said.
Kmet recently wrote two open letters, including one addressed to party leaders. He asked them to depoliticize health care and work together to make a difference to address what he calls health care in “crisis.” He said it isn’t something to quibble over.
“Time will show us what sort of action they all take in this space,” Kmet said.
“This is a really big problem, and we can't let it be a problem that gets put into the space where it gets punted back and forth like a football, like everyone needs to acknowledge the same problem so that everyone can appropriately address it with the solutions that it needs.”
The other open letter by Kmet, which cites a 2018 report on surgical services at the Whitehorse hospital, notes the report recommended four operating rooms to account for population growth, aging demographics, waitlists and backlogs. The letter states the Yukon’s population has grown by 6,000 since the report and surgical service volumes went up from 2,617 in 2017-18 to 3,841 in 2022-23.
Kmet asks when the hospital will get the recommended upgrades to its aging infrastructure.
Poole agrees that the health-care system is in “crisis.”
Poole said the 2018 study showed a need for four proper operating rooms in the Yukon. He wants to see action taken on that plan. He’s hopeful, but not confident that any of the territorial political parties will act on the file.
“Something's got to be done. I think that the population, I think, will eventually demand it,” Poole said.
“I think we just have to be honest with ourselves. We can either afford to provide the care that is standard in Canada for all Yukoners, or not. And that's going to, unfortunately, cost money. I suspect it's not money that Yukon has. They have to involve the federal government, but the ask is there. We're not serving the population as it stands now.”
Contact Dana Hatherly at dana.hatherly@yukon-news.com
