toh

The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) works continuously to improve efficiency and is committed to high quality of care. Recently, the media raised concerns about the increasing wait times for MRI scans at The Ottawa Hospital.

Wait times are increasing despite the fact that we run our MR scanners more efficiently than any other institution in the province. We currently run our equipment 23 hours a day, six days a week. So based upon the capacity that we have and the efficiency that we have, it is simply a case of the demand exceeding the supply.

To manage this high demand, when a requisition comes in, we give them a priority number based on the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s Provincial Wait Time Priority tool.

P1 cases: Emergency cases. These are done very quickly, almost always within a matter of hours.

P2 cases: Urgent cases. These are patients who need to get care in a timely fashion in order to manage their condition. They are mostly patients in the hospital and occasionally patients outside of the hospital.

P3 cases: Non-acute cases. These are divided into patients who have cancer and patients who don’t have cancer. Cancer patients have a greater need for imaging than non-cancer patients, therefore we over-prioritize them and refer to them as P3+ cases. When the media gives our times for P3, the cancer patients are mixed in with the non-cancer patients. So it is a reality that some of the P3 cases wait longer than the Ministry standard, but about 80 percent of the cancer patient scans are done within the Ministry standard.

P4 cases: Chronic conditions. These are elective tests where the demand far exceeds our capacity to do the scans. This is the number most often quoted in the media and ours, to be honest, is over 200 days, which I believe is unacceptable. I wish I could do something about it.

 *note: numbers reflect January to March 2012

Dr. Mark Schweitzer
Chief and Chair of Radiology
The Ottawa Hospital

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