A potential 11 year surgery wait: Community member fed up with surgery wait times

Bork has Dupuytren’s Contracture, also known as Viking’s Claw, which he explained is a condition in which one or more fingers become permanently bent in a flexed position due to calcifying. At the moment one of his pinkies is impacted, but the condition can spread, meaning the longer his surgery is delayed the worse his hand’s mobility will get.

“It’s going to keep spreading into my entire hand until my hand locks up and calcifies. It’s more prevalent if you are doing a labor position, which I am, and it spreads and eventually your hand will calcify and then you lose total function of your hand at that point.”

Bork has been a carpenter since 2012 but has recently switched into wildland firefighting because his ability to grip things has been impacted. Surgery to address his Dupuytren’s Contracture would allow him to continue working, so beyond the obvious importance of needing functioning hands for day-to-day life, he says the surgery would save his livelihood. Bork is certainly feeling the urgency of the situation, but he feel Northern Health does not.

“If I could opt out I would just because of the lack of service. And I can’t even give you a reason as to why there is a lack of service, because I haven’t been given a reason. I don’t know if it’s inefficiency or inconsistency, there’s no reason”

Bork feels he’s completely out of options at this point, as the treatment he’s received has been minimal at best. When he first went to the doctor in 2020 he was told he would need a referral, and in 2022 he was notified his doctor left without notice, meaning he would have to go through the entire process again. Bork has gone through every avenue he could think of, including MLA Shirley Bond and even federal MPs, but to this point he has yet to receive any answers or even potential dates for his surgery.

“If it starts spreading to the rest of my palm I’ll just chop off my pinky, get it cauterized. I’ll get better service going into the E.R. with a missing finger then I will waiting for a surgery.”

Northern Health responded to a CKPG News request for an interview about this matter with a written statement:

“Northern Health can’t speak to individual circumstances, for privacy reasons. Patients are encouraged to work directly with the specialist’s office to which they’ve been referred for surgical consultation and arranging for a procedure, with respect to the wait time for surgery – which is directly linked to the priority their surgeon assigns to their procedure, according to provincially standardized levels of priority. The results of all surgical consultations are confidential, between the patient and their surgeon.

In BC, two parts of a patient’s journey to scheduled surgery make up the total time a patient may wait for a scheduled surgical procedure: the time that starts when a patient is referred to a surgeon, and ends when they see their surgeon for the first time, and; the time that starts when a booking form is received by the health authority, and ends when the patient receives scheduled surgery.

Northern Health and the Ministry of Health continue to work to reduce wait times for surgeries and to recruit the skilled staff needed to provide surgical services across the region, and province. As of the most recent quarterly report on BC’s Surgical Renewal, BC hospitals performed six per cent more surgeries in 2023-24 (as of August 2023) than in the comparable period of 2019-2020. Last week, more surgeries were performed in BC than in any week prior.”

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by Tommy Osborne

A potential 11 year surgery wait: Community member fed up with surgery wait times

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