The question is why are we were we are?
Are we committing our dollars in a different area?
If all hospitals are funded equally, then where are the dollars being spent?

Next question is why the difference in data. Are there 4 OR's operating full time or not? Considering Dr. Moran's history in this city, I tend to believe him.

A friend will be starting her 4th year of nursing and has been advised by the hospital, they will be laying off nurses and not hiring any new ones. So.... what is that all about? I realize the hospital/or powers that be regularly lay off the nurses then call them back on overtime. I think there needs to be a serious rethink on how matters are organized not only at the hospital but also within this Health Authority in the Region
I agree, I also believe Dr. Moran.

My child has chrones desease and when in a flare up we spend many nights in the emergency. We have never been able to be seen and out of there in less than 5 hours and most of the time over 7. I had to go to White Rock for surgery 3 months ago and on the day I was released I had to visit the Port Coquitlam emergency. I was checked in, seen by the doctor and released in under 2 hours. It was a Friday night and 10 times busier than this emergency every is. It is rediculous! I have seen so many gross things going on in there such as new patients put into beds/cots where the bedding has not been changed from the previous patient. (this I seen more than once!). I can not and will not believe that a doctor would say anything to the press that was untrue. I believe what he says! IMO The people who run our hospital are putting all the money into administration and ultimately taking from staff that actually care for us. Someone needs to be replaced and soon. God forbid that we ever see a epidemic here where lots of people get sick. You got to wonder when your own doctore sends you to Vancouver for surgery and says " I dont want you having that here!".

what I don't get is when you phone for an appointment with your doctor they are booked up solid they will tell you when your doctor will be at the walk in clinic and to go there that is pretty bad, you try to stay out of emergency and walk in clinics but when you can't get an appointment you have no choice.

Once again we have this so called great City, Jewel of the North, BC's Northern Capital, not living up to its hype.

Why are we the worst at 21%. If you think that this type of publicity does not impact on whether or not people come to this town, you are just kidding yourself.

We need to provide better hospital services, lower taxes, better roads and infrastructure so that people will want to come here and stay here.

People in the outlying areas count on Prince George for these services, and we have a responsibility to provide them. We have people at Northern Health that get paid close to one quarter of a million dollars per year to solve these ;problems, and its time that they did so.

Its time to get rid of the accolades, and put pressure on these people to provide the leadership and organizational skills that they are being paid to provide. Less pomp and circumstance, and more basics, is what we need.

We shuld be striving to ;provide the best hos;pital services in British Columbia.

"Less pomp and circumstance, and more basics, is what we need."

Palopu for Mayor! (I'll vote as many times for you as I am legally permitted to do).

Well said Palopu! Thank you. :}

Simple answer, as to why:
Too much bureaucracy.
Too many administrators.
metalman.

Bang on Palopu!
Well said!

Prince George may be worse off than other hospitals in the Province but since Gordo has stated that he wants our health care system to emulate the present U.S. system you may be assured that things are only going to get worse.

I understand that he plans on a multi billion dollar International Health Care facility to be built with private and government funds on the U.B.C.grounds and that it will operate on a user pay basis so you can bet that this is going to suck a lot of the quality doctors and nurses out of the public system and starve the latter system even more both staff and funding wise.

To think I voted for this guy. He is even starting to make the N.D.P.look good. :-((

"Dr. Moran is asking why other facilities in the province have been able to clear their orthopaedic surgical back log, but PGRH has not?"

I would think that he is closer to anyone on here to being able to provide that answer.
Looking at the little information provided, the second column provides the cases done in 3 months. If the cases waiting in the first column is divided by the patients done in the second column one would get an average number of months or weeks it would take to process the waiting patients.

The average waiting times for some key communities then become:
1. Prince George = 60.2 weeks
4. Kamloops = 27.6
6. Vancouver General = 25.6
14. Kelowna = 17.6
15. UBC = 14.6
17. Nanaimo = 14.3
25. St. Paul’s = 10.2
27 Greater Victoria = 8.3
29 Kitimat = 4.3
The provincial average is 17.5 weeks.

However, the site which provides this information has more detail on it. It includes the actual surgeons in each hospital, their patient numbers waiting for an operation and their personal wait time.
http://www.swl.hlth.gov.bc.ca/swl/swl_db/swl.WaitlistPkg.GetWaitListBySurgSpecNLF?IHospital=102&IEvent=93.51

There are a total of 108 surgeons on the lists with 13 of them having patients with operating times in 2 hospitals.

Dr. Moran has the longest waiting time at 63.8 weeks with 46 patients. There are no stats given with the numbers of cases completed in the last 3 months for individual doctors, just for the hospital total for all doctors operating there.

Dr. Richardson in Vernon is the second longest at 52.6 weeks with only 6 patients waiting.

Dr. Van Der Merwe in Kitimat is the third longest at 34.8 weeks with only 2 patients waiting. How that works with his past 3 month record as reported for the Kitimat hospital, I do not know. Could be he is taking a half year off or the operating room is shut down for a while. Or maybe he is a new doctor and it is another doctor who provided the stats for the last 3 months. These are the kinds of details we really do not know.

The best for length of waiting time in Prince George is Dr. Nelson at 11.7 weeks with 6 patients.

If you can become Dr. Malish’s patient in Kelowna, you can join the 3 others and have an average waiting time of 2.1 weeks.

Questions that are not answered in the article.
1. Why the vast difference in the number of patients per doctor
2. Why the vast difference in waiting times with various doctors which does not seem to correlate very well with the number of patients (Dr. Dreyer in PG has 33 patients, yet a below average waiting time of 12.8 weeks)
3. Why is Prince George sitting with such long wait lists when other hospitals in the Northern Health region are not?
4. What is the number of new patients coming in each 3 month period. Without that we cannot see whether we arte moving towards lower numbers over a foreseeable future.
5. Why bother providing statistics that are incomplete and thus are meaningless?

Since this tracks hip replacements only, I assume the main reason is that some doctors have other preferred operations they do, thus hip replacements get in line with many other surgeries, while other doctors may specialize a bit more in such surgeries.

Maybe Dr. Moran could provide a better explanation for what is going on than the teaser provided.