Revisiting the concept of urgency in surgical prioritization and addressing backlogs in elective surgery provision

Revisiting the concept of urgency in surgical prioritization and addressing backlogs in elective surgery provision Commentary Health services Revisiting the concept of urgency in surgical prioritization and addressing backlogs in elective surgery provision Kayla Wiebe MA, Simon Kelley MBChB PhD, Roxanne E. [...] In the context of allocat Key points ing surgical resources, urgent procedures are prioritized over • Prioritizing urgency in surgery in Canada leads to a problem of elective (scheduled) ones.1 However, prioritizing urgency, par 2 wait lists: a growing wait list of urgent cases and a much larger ticularly in times of resource constraints, leads to a problem of wait list of scheduled cases that f. [...] The first type is the scheduled • Governments should fund health care systems to ensure timely case that will eventually become urgent, where the consequence completion of elective surgeries while still ensuring that urgent of a delay in timely surgery is that the patient’s outcome is worse surgeries can be accommodated. [...] Affiliations: Graduate Department of Philosophy (Wiebe), Univer sity of Toronto; Clinical Research, Perioperative Services (Wiebe), The Hospital for Sick Children; Division of Orthopedic Surgery (Kelley), The Hospital for Sick Children; Department of Surgery (Kelley), Fac ulty of Medicine, University of Toronto; Departments of Bioe thics and of Critical Care Medicine (Kirsch), The Hospital for S. [...] Contributors: All of the authors contributed to the conception and design of the work, drafted the manuscript, revised it critically for important intellectual content, gave final approval of the ver sion to be published and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work.