If your family doctor decides you should have a colonoscopy for cancer screening, you may feel anxious thinking about the potential health issue. You may also worry about the procedure itself, and if you’ll feel much discomfort.

But for one Nova Scotia patient, that’s nothing compared to the frustration he felt when the referral letter arrived in his mailbox, within the week, announcing that he was looking at a wait time of 12 months.

Canadians are famous for ignoring an issue until it strikes a chord with us, personally. Wait times for diagnostic services are getting longer and longer, and we know they remain significantly higher than in most leading industrialized countries.

So how long are you expected to wait for a service? It seems to depend on where you live.

The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) works with other national medication organizations to lobby for implementation of wait-time commitments. They co-founded the Wait Time Alliance, and run annual Taming of the Queue conferences.

According to the Wait Time Alliance, 90% of patients in Newfoundland and Labrador received their hip replacement within six months compared to only 37% of patients in Nova Scotia.

In 2004, the Canadian government committed $5.5 billion to a 10-year plan to reduce wait times in five key areas: cardiac care, cancer care, diagnostic imaging, joint replacement, and sight restoration. However, 11 years later, we haven’t seen much progress in shortening these wait times.

The Wait Time Alliance designed benchmarks for these five key areas:

Then the Wait Time Alliance went a step further – rather, seven steps further – and devised wait-time benchmarks in 12 other areas of care:

Take Nova Scotia, for example. The current wait time for a hip replacement ranges from an average of 119 days (four months) in Sydney (at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital) to 366 days (just over a year) in Dartmouth (at the Dartmouth General Hospital).

The Wait Time Alliance says an acceptable benchmark for a hip replacement is within 24 hours for emergency cases, within 30 days for urgent cases, and scheduled treatment should be done within six months of consultation. Patients waiting for a hip replacement at the Dartmouth General may wait double the acceptable wait time — or even longer.

Nova Scotia’s current wait time for a knee replacement ranges from an average of 172 days (almost six months) in New Glasgow (at the Aberdeen Hospital) to 516 days (one year and four months) in Dartmouth (at the Dartmouth General Hospital).

The Wait Time Alliance says an acceptable benchmark for a knee replacement is within 24 hours for emergency cases, within 30 days for urgent cases, and scheduled treatment should be done within six months of consultation. This means that only a single hospital in Nova Scotian has an average knee replacement wait time that squeaks in within the recommended benchmark.

According to a study on the cost of wait times in Canada, there’s a high cost to our excessive waits for medical care. Long wait times for just four procedures (joint replacement surgery, sight restoration, coronary artery bypass graft surgery, and MRI scans) cost the Canadian economy an estimated $14.8 billion in 2007.

Cost aside, wait times also take an emotional, physical, and financial toll on patients and their families.

When a patient has to wait for a procedure, their condition may worsen — putting the patient at risk for complications, and possibly needing a more invasive treatment.

Long wait times do not automatically go hand-in-hand with having a universal health care system. Canadians are suffering from excess wait times, and something needs to be done.

For more information on wait times in Canada, please visit http://www.waittimealliance.ca/for-professionals.