A new report highlights Canada’s major drop in surgeries during the early years of the pandemic, but those pains were felt unequally across the country’s patchwork provincial health-care systems — with the largest decrease in procedures seen in Newfoundland and Labrador.
The findings were released Wednesday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), an independent organization which compiles and analyzes health system data.
The CIHI team found roughly 743,000 fewer surgeries were performed in Canada during the first 2½ years of the pandemic — a drop of about 13 per cent compared to 2019.
“It takes a long time to catch up when you
