Health Care Wait Times - What is the Real Story? - Ontario Health Coalition (Fraser Institute findings....)

What is the Real Story?

 
Posted: December 8, 2015

By: Natalie Mehra, Executive Director, Ontario Health Coalition

 

Today, a high-profile report tracking health care wait times was released from the Wait Times Alliance. Eliminating Code Gridlock in Canada’s Health Care System, is a credible summary and a useful addition to public policy decisions about health care planning. It is written by an alliance of physician specialists’ organizations to track progress in wait times and public reporting.

Leeching off of the publicity for the day, the Fraser Institute — a pro-privatization think-tank (see Who Funds the Fraser Institute? here and here) — also released their annual wait times report. Releasing this report at the same time as the release of the Wait Times Alliance Report may garner extra media, but it is bound to cause confusion.

Both reports are about wait times in health care. But the similarities stop there.

The methodology of the Fraser Institute is based on the subjective viewpoints of the small proportion of physician specialists who answer their surveys. If you read the methodology section of their report, you will find that their response rate is only 21%. That is, they received answers from just one in five of the physicians they surveyed.The Fraser Institute uses a number of different methods to take these survey results and turn them into the median (middle) wait times that they report nationally and for each province.....