Federal Government Gets Wait Times Guarantees From All Provinces
The Canadian federal government has announced that all provinces and territories have agreed to establish health care wait times guarantees by 2010. It's a far cry from what the Conservatives were talking about in the 2006 federal election campaign though.
Wait Times Guarantees Categories
During the last election campaign, the Conservatives said they would work with the provinces to establish guarantees for wait times in five priority health care areas — cancer, heart, diagnostic imaging, joint replacements and sight restoration.
Instead of getting agreement in all five areas, the federal government got each jurisdiction to agree to develop a wait time guarantee in just one of the five priority areas or primary care by 2010. The areas chosen by each of the provinces or territories depended on its "priorities, capacity and different starting points."
The wait time guarantees being established will include a defined timeframe to establish when medically necessary health care services should be delivered as well as access to alternatives that will be automatically offered to patients if the system fails to deliver treatment within that time frame - treatment outside the province for example.
Wait Times Guarantees Funding
In order to provide these wait time guarantees, the provinces will use a total of $612 million in federal funding allocated on a per capita basis in the 2007 federal budget.
Provincial Agreements on Wait Time Guarantees
The health care category, the target date and the amount allocated in federal funding for the provincial and territory health care wait times guarantees are:
