Health Quality Ontario has just updated the information available on its website showing how well long-term care is being delivered in the province. It puts a fresh face on the largest, longest-running data collection and reporting system in Canada for quality of care information on long-term care homes.
With these homes having a resident population with increasingly complex care needs, the evidence suggests the quality of care provided to those residents is improving in many respects, but that more can be done.
Earlier this summer, Health Quality Ontario revamped its public reporting on wait times to make it more user-friendly. We also added reporting on the wait time between a specialist receiving the referral from the patient's family doctor, to the patient's first surgical or specialist appointment, to gain a fuller picture of the patient experience.
Since then, the data has been used on numerous occasions to document how well or badly one hospital is doing compared to the rest of the province. There have also been almost 100,000 page views of the wait times pages on the Health Quality Ontario website since their launch. Interest in the information remains strong and there were more than 13,000 page views of the nine wait times measures pages between mid-November and mid-December.
Reflecting back to 2003, clinicians, patients and other stakeholders identified access to care as a major issue for some health services. Particular concern was expressed about wait times for surgical care for cataract surgery, joint replacement surgery, cancer surgery and cardiac surgery as well as for diagnostic imaging services including CT and MRI scans.
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“The overcrowding of emergency departments is probably the largest impediment in our health care system to deal(ing) with any surge event,” the Ontario-based Centre for Excellence in Emergency Preparedness wrote a decade ago.
The history of public reporting in Ontario is a short one. And its significance comes to a point as Health Quality Ontario publishes its 10th yearly edition of the performance of our health care system.