Neighbor to the North facing a ‘very bleak future’ if medical imaging not modernized soon

Canada has fallen behind other industrialized nations in multiple measures of capital healthcare investment, and the most glaring gap is found in the state of its medical imaging equipment—35% of which is 10 or more years old.

The news comes from a report issued by an independent research organization, the Conference Board of Canada, by way of the Canadian Association of Radiologists. The CAR is publicizing the report [1] to help convey the seriousness of the report authors’ findings.

“Medical imaging lives at the center of healthcare in Canada, touching patients’ lives during multiple phases of their care journey,” says CAR president Gilles Soulez, MD, in a press release. “Demand is growing, but our equipment and processes are not keeping up with what is required to diagnose and treat patients.”

The CAR notes the European Coordination Committee of Radiological, Electromedical and Healthcare IT Industry’s “Golden Rule,” which holds that no more than 10% of imaging equipment should still be in service as of its 10th anniversary.

Chad Leaver, the Conference Board’s director of health, names lengthening wait times for imaging services as a concerning indicator of the country’s health-status trajectory relative to that of peer nations.

“Increased wait times … have a substantial cost to the Canadian economy,” Leaver says. Preparing Canada for the future has become more important now than ever, he adds, because “timely access to medical imaging will be key to the success of provincial/territorial strategies to address surgical and cancer care backlogs that Canadians and care providers are facing because of the pandemic.”

To this Soulez adds that, even before the pandemic, Canadians were waiting an average of 50 to 82 days for CT scans and 89 days for MR imaging—some 20 to 52 days longer than the 30-day wait time recommended by published guidelines.

More from Soulez:

[T]his backlog increased significantly during the pandemic and, according to a survey of CAR members, most centers cannot catch up with this additional workload. Without additional investment in equipment and human resources and modernization of prioritizing and referring imaging, we are looking at a very bleak future.”