‘Getting worse by the day’: These patients say they nearly died as they waited to get health care in Canada

A new report found that thousands of Canadians have died while waiting to receive various health services. Heather Wright reports.

Joan Hama says she nearly died because she waited months longer than she should have for a colonoscopy.

While the best practice was to get the colonoscopy within 60 days, the 68-year-old woman said she was put on an eight-month wait list, which delayed her colon cancer diagnosis eight years ago.

About four months during the waiting period, she said she felt excruciating stomach pain. Her colon had ruptured because of a cancer tumour that blocked it and she had to undergo emergency surgery. The surgeon removed the cancerous growth and she had to be resuscitated numerous times during the procedure, she said.

“If the colon cancer could have been caught initially, I wouldn’t have this huge scar running down my stomach,” the retired financial planner from West Kelowna, B.C., said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca on Tuesday, tearing up at times as she talked about the “pain and difficulty” of recovering after the surgery.

“I pretty well would have died on the operating table,” she added. “I still get upset about this ... It took me about two years to finally start recovering.”

As a new report from SecondStreet.org found that thousands of Canadians have died waiting for various types of health services, CTVNews.ca spoke with a few Canadians about their struggle to get timely care.

‘Medical refugee’

Melanie Leeson of Cobble Hill, B.C., says she too had a close call. Leeson, who considers herself a “medical refugee,” says she had to travel to the United States to get treatment for an aggressive ovarian cancer because of obstacles to getting the care she needed in Canada.

“You can’t get the help you need in a timely manner, or you can’t get the more advanced help that would help save your life,” Leeson told CTVNews.ca. “You’re just a person that has to look after their own health and figure it all out and do it while you’re sick, which is brutal.”

Leeson adds that it took 111 days to get treatment after her diagnosis, much longer than the recommended four weeks.

“My doctor had gone to the cancer agency a couple of times and tried to get me admitted,” she said. “Until they knew it was ovarian cancer, I can’t get into the cancer agency without a confirmed biopsy.”

Leeson says as she was “getting worse by the day,” she found another patient with a similar situation who helped connect her with a doctor in Baltimore, who was well-known for saving the lives of late-stage cancer patients with abdominal cancers.

“I really did feel it was my best option to go to the States,” she said.

Leeson and her husband, Shane, flew to Baltimore in April 2024, where a laparoscopic biopsy revealed she had late-stage ovarian cancer. The doctor advised her to go home to get chemotherapy immediately and said she may be eligible to undergo an advanced operation that’s widely available in the U.S., which he said gives cancer patients a chance to live longer.

Upon her return to Canada, she says the B.C. cancer agency told her it could admit her in nine weeks.

“I said ‘I don’t have nine weeks.’ I said ‘this is advanced and growing rapidly,’” Leeson said. “What I didn’t know at the time was I had approximately two months to live.”

Her oncologist appointment was moved up to three weeks, and she was able to get chemotherapy shortly after that, which she says was “very effective.”

After flying back to Baltimore to see the doctor, Leeson says she got another laparoscopic procedure and learned she was a candidate for an advanced procedure known as cytoreductive surgery (CRS). However, the surgeries cost a total of $240,000, so she and her husband used much of their retirement savings and raised funds through GoFundMe.

The procedure removed non-essential organs, including her gallbladder and her spleen, where the cancer may have spread. She also had a type of chemotherapy called hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) that targeted micro-cancer cells.

Because of the advanced treatments Leeson received in the U.S., the doctor told her she has a longer survival rate of five-to-10 years.

“It’s been devastating,” she said, noting that she now gets treatments in B.C. but returns to the U.S. every six months for a checkup. “But I’m alive and right now I have no evidence of disease ... It’s been worth the road that we had to take.”

Wait-list tragedies

While Hama and Leeson survived, thousands of other Canadians in similar situations didn’t make it.

Nearly 75,000 Canadians have died waiting for various types of health services, from cancer treatment to MRI scans, since April 2018, according to government data released by the non-profit, public policy think tank SecondStreet.org.

“Thousands of Canadians across the country find themselves on waitlists — in some cases for several years — with too many tragically dying before ever getting treated, or even diagnosed," Harrison Fleming, the Calgary-based legislative and policy director at SecondStreet.org, said in a press release Wednesday.

At least 15,474 patients in Canada died from 2023 to 2024 while waiting for a wide range of surgeries, procedures or diagnostic scans, such as heart operations, hip operations and cataract surgeries, the data showed. The figure doesn’t include Quebec, Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador, and most of Manitoba. SecondStreet.org said Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia only provided data on patients who died while waiting for surgeries.

SecondStreet.org says the number is incomplete because several governments don’t track the problem or only provided partial data.

Many government health-care bodies don’t track data about wait-list deaths, the think tank added, so the true numbers may be “substantially higher.”

“While it seems unlikely that a patient would die due to not receiving something like a hip or knee operation in a timely manner, readers might consider that patients often lead inactive lives while waiting for such procedures,” SecondStreet.org wrote in its report. “Inactivity can lead to other unrelated health problems and contribute to a patient’s premature death.”

Health-care reforms

Among its proposed solutions, SecondStreet.org is calling for governments to improve tracking of serious flaws in hospital operations, namely the number of patients who died while waiting for life-saving treatment or while waiting longer than the recommended wait times.

In addition, it recommends governments “proactively” disclose the information like they do with health inspections for restaurants.

Other highlights of findings

- SecondStreet.org estimates the number of patients who died last year was nearly double at about 28,077 patients if the data includes provinces and health regions that didn’t provide data.

- In some cases, patients died after less than a week to more than 14 years waiting for treatment, though SecondStreet.org said “some response data is vague.”

- New Ontario Health data suggests 378 patients died while waiting for cardiac surgery or a cardiac procedure.

SecondStreet.org says it obtained the data from provincial governments and their health authorities from April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024, through freedom of information requests.

‘Unacceptable wait times’

Dr. Brett Belchetz, co-founder and CEO of virtual health-care platform Maple in Toronto, says the report’s findings aren’t surprising.

“We see this day in and day out in medical practice, unfortunately,” the former emergency room physician said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca on Tuesday. “In my career, I’ve seen multiple instances of unacceptable wait times for surgeries, unacceptable wait times for imaging. And even when the outcome is not as bad as somebody potentially passing away, in many, many instances, the outcome of those unacceptable wait times are a lot of pain and suffering.”

Belchetz said he has seen many patients who had a “concerning finding” on a mammography or other types of screens that recommended they do a medical imaging test or MRI to assess whether the issue was serious and required treatment.

“I’ve seen many times where the wait for those kinds of screens can take many months,” he said.

“And as we all know, particularly in the world of oncology, we know that time is everything. Delayed diagnosis means a much, much lower likelihood of an accurate diagnosis being made, of acceptable treatment being rendered.”

He also saw many tragic cases with delays for procedures such as cancer and cardiac care, he added.

“What I’ve seen many times in my career is individuals who may have been treatable if they had gotten access to that scan immediately when it was first recommended, but by the time the scan was done, their diagnosis was no longer treatable,” Belchetz said. “It is fair to say when people are waiting three to six months or sometimes even longer for scans or for surgeries, the outcomes can be very bad.”

In some cases when he was working in the ER, patients who required a CT scan to diagnose urgent conditions couldn’t get it on a weekend due to “limited access,” he said.

“I have had patients pass away while we were waiting for a CT technician to come into the emergency room to do those scans. ... So even in emergency room settings where one would think imaging should be available immediately, we are seeing unacceptable delays that sometimes results in lost life.”