The 2026 budget of British Columbia (BC) “fails patients” by ignoring 1.2 million individuals waiting for specialist care, Consultant Specialists of BC (cSBC) warned earlier this month. “Despite announcing $2.77 billion in additional health spending over 3 years, the budget contains no dedicated funding, no structural reform, and no accountability measures to improve access to specialist care,” the organization said.

“This budget completely ignores patients currently waiting for their initial consultation with a specialist,” neurologist Robert Carruthers, MD, president of the cSBC, told Medscape News Canada. Because no funding is targeted at fixing the “crisis,” he said, “we continue to watch the system deteriorate in real time.”

For the parents of Desiree Thring, the waits were fatal. Thring, a young woman whose life was “blown apart” due to wait times, told Medscape News Canada that she lost both of her parents within less than 2 years because they could not receive timely diagnoses or treatment. In May 2023, her mother died after being diagnosed with cancer. In December 2023, her father became ill, and Thring said by the time he also was diagnosed with cancer, his oncologist said he was too weak to receive treatment, and he died in February, 2025.

After her parents’ deaths, Thring was hospitalized with a “hypertension crisis” due to the stress and trauma, she said. She is now in stage IV kidney failure, and her specialist says it’s not safe for her to carry a child.

“I truly believe that if we did not have the challenges to receive access in a timely manner, the outcomes would have been different,” she said. “I feel as though my mom would still be here, and I probably would have had more time with my father.”

Long wait times for specialty care in Canada are no secret. The Fraser Institute recently reported a median wait time in 2025 of 28.6 weeks — the second longest ever recorded — between a referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment. Although that number is down from 30.0 weeks in 2024, it is 208% longer than the 9.3 week wait Canadian patients could expect in 1993, the institute said. 

The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) also documented wait times for four “priority” types of surgeries, including hip replacement. It found that in 2024, 26% more hip replacement surgeries were performed in Canada than in 2019. But despite the increase, only 68% of patients received the procedure within the recommended 6 months. A similar pattern was found for knee replacements.

Why the Wait?

Many factors influence healthcare wait times in Canada, according to CIHI's report. Key drivers include the following:

• Population growth and aging: The number of Canadians aged 65 years or older grew by 19% between 2019 and 2024, which is almost double the growth rate of Canada’s overall population.
• Health workforce shortages: Canada is experiencing a shortage of healthcare workers, including surgical care staff, that limits the system’s ability to meet growing demands.
• Competition for limited resources: Hospitals are having a hard time meeting increased demand for surgeries because the availability of operating rooms and hospital beds is limited.

Lack of government support is a key issue in specialist wait times, Carruthers said. “The government seems singularly focused on ensuring access to primary care as a major deliverable. But they haven’t been making access to specialist care a priority. This is unfortunate because when you give hundreds of thousands of people access to primary care, the next thing that happens is that many of them get referred to see a specialist or get referred for diagnostic testing, imaging, and other related services.”

“We need to be thinking about the knock-on impact of the current political priorities,” he added. “In the face of improving primary care, access to specialty care is getting worse, and the government has not implemented solutions to improve the efficiency of the referral process.”

Consequences for Patients

Statistics Canada recently released findings from a survey on healthcare access and patient experiences with primary and specialist care in 2024. The analysis focused on wait time for an initial consultation with a medical specialist, satisfaction with the wait time, and the effect of the wait time on people’s lives.

Satisfaction with the wait time was directly linked to the amount of time an individual waited to see a specialist. Among those who saw a specialist within less than 1 month, 83% said they were very satisfied or satisfied with the wait time. However, the rate dropped to 50% for those who saw a specialist within 1-3 months. And fewer than 1 in 5 Canadians (17%) who waited for longer than 3 months were very satisfied or satisfied with the wait time.

The proportion of Canadians who reported being very satisfied or satisfied with the wait time ranged from 61% in Quebec to 44% in BC. “I’m aware that other provinces have significant issues in people accessing specialist care as well,” Carruthers said. “But it looks like in the grand scheme of things, British Columbians are struggling more to access care.”

Not surprisingly, Statistics Canada stated in the survey results that prolonged wait times to access specialist care “can adversely affect patient health outcomes by delaying timely diagnosis and necessary interventions. Patients may also experience increased anxiety, stress, pain, and worsening of their condition while waiting for care.”

Among Canadians who had an initial consultation with a medical specialist in the 12 months prior to the survey, 64% reported that their lives were affected by the wait time. Of these individuals, 66% experienced worry, anxiety, and stress; approximately 36% experienced pain; and 32% had difficulties with activities of daily living. Furthermore, 22% said their health or health condition had deteriorated, and 12% experienced other symptoms. 

The cSBC’s 2026 pre-budget submission  to the government includes more patient stories. “We’re going to see more people speaking about their experience in the healthcare system in a negative light and demanding change,” Carruthers noted.

What’s Being Done

According to CIHI, strategies to reduce wait times are being implemented across Canada. Those strategies include centralized access, booking, and intake processes to streamline the process for specialist appointments; surgical wait-list monitoring and management; and alternative care settings such as private clinics and rapid access clinics.

“It’s likely that those strategies are working to a certain extent, but they’re also fighting against increased demand that’s coming from the growing aging population,” Ben Reason, project lead for health system analytics at the Canadian Institute for Health Analytics, told Medscape News Canada. The CIHI report includes a quote from a patient advisor who says that in recent years, many more hip and knee replacements have been performed in day surgery rather than in acute care, another strategy that is more efficient because it uses fewer hospital resources and frees acute care beds for other patients.

“This [development] is important because we know that patients waiting for available acute care beds is a significant factor in emergency department wait times,” Reason said. “However, the option of day surgery joint replacement is really only available to healthier patients with fewer underlying conditions because they require less postsurgical monitoring.”

The cSBC has repeatedly called on the government to invest in new tools to support specialists in managing their wait lists, Carruthers noted. It has called for the following actions:

• Creating a provincewide wait list database detailing practice demographics, wait list sizes, and wait times that is updated in real time. This tool could help quantify the scale of waiting, reveal geographic and specialty gaps, track trends over time, and measure the impact of interventions.
• Providing new tools for specialists to manage wait lists and remunerating active wait list management and optimization.
• Recognizing and formalizing a process for specialists to provide written advice to primary care providers in lieu of a formal consultation.

“Structural change is necessary for us to improve efficiencies in the system, but in the face of significant demographic changes and other pressures, accessing specialist care will not immediately improve without intervention,” Carruthers said.

Thring’s experience with the challenges in obtaining timely access to care for her parents inspired her to create the nonprofit organization Not Just One Voice to promote meaningful change in healthcare.

In partnership with the Jim Pattison Centre for Health Systems Learning + Innovation, the organization, which will launch for British Columbians soon, will give voice to patients, family members, and providers, Thring said. It will also look for trends and patterns across the lived experiences of patients and providers, to be used for health systems learning and quality improvement in healthcare.

“When you find yourself in a situation where you are up against the clock and stuck in wait lists for healthcare for yourself or those you love, you realize that your health and access to timely healthcare is more important than anything else in the world,” Thring said. “This is why we need to do better.”

CIHI will be releasing 2025 data on wait times for priority procedures on June 11. The release will be paired with an analysis of emergency wait times in Canada, Reason said.

Carruthers, Thring, and Reason reported having no relevant financial relationships. 

Marilynn Larkin, MA, is an award-winning medical writer and editor whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Medscape Medical News and its sister publication MDedge, The Lancet (where she was a contributing editor), and Reuters Health.