Ontario’s publicly funded healthcare system costs billions of dollars to operate and touches millions of lives every year. Dedicated staff and professionals work long and hard to routinely deliver care that was unimaginable a generation ago and difficult a decade ago.

The Ontario Health Quality Council’s job is to report to the public on the quality of health care in the province and support its improvement. We salute the good work that’s done, we encourage others to learn from it and change for the better and we promote quality improvement at every level of care. But it’s also our job to highlight areas that need to be improved.

We began our work by looking at what Ontarians want from their healthcare system. We asked and found the people of Ontario share a common vision; we all want a system that is accessible, effective, safe, patient-centred, equitable, efficient, integrated, focused on population health and has the appropriate resources to get its work done. We call these the nine attributes of a high-performing health system. Every year we look at indicators — aspects of health care we can measure and keep track of — for these nine attributes and publish a report on them. Our yearly reports also hone in on areas that need improvement. For instance, in our 2009 report we found that:

• The large majority of patients who need cardiac procedures are today treated within the target time.
• From September 2005 to December 2008, waits for knee replacements declined from 440 days to 189 days, for hip replacements from almost a year to 162 days, and for cataract surgery from about 310 days to about 103 days.
• Half of patients needing cancer surgery (categorized as Priority 2) are not getting their surgery within the medically acceptable two-week timeframe. Some are waiting twice as long.
• Ontario is doing twice as many MRI scans as it did before the introduction of the Wait Times Strategy, but waits for low urgency MRI scans have fluctuated between 90 to 120 days for almost four years, well over the target of 28 days.
• Access to family doctors hasn’t improved since 2006 – 7.4 percent of adults in Ontario don’t have a family doctor and about half that number, or 400,000 people, are looking for a doctor, but can’t find one.
  
• More than half of “sicker adults” – people who described their health as “fair” or poor” – surveyed in Ontario say they wait more than a month to see a specialist after being referred. In contrast, only one in four people in Germany, the Netherlands and the US have to wait that long.
  
• Waits for places in long-term care homes have doubled in the last two years, from 49 days to 106 days.
  

For more information, read a Summary of our 2009 report, or download the report.

Other Public Reporting Efforts

Wait Times in Hospitals As part of a provincial strategy to improve wait times for surgical procedures in Ontario hospitals, the Ontario government, through the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, reports to the public on wait times for individual procedures and at a facility level, through the Ministry’s website: http://www.health.gov.on.ca/transformation/wait_times/wait_mn.html

Patient Safety in Hospitals In September 2008, the Ontario government, through the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, started reporting to the public on infection rates and other indicators of patient safety in Ontario hospitals through a new website: http://www.health.gov.on.ca/patient_safety/index.html