Canada's priority wait times are not clinic phone access

Canada’s best-known wait-time numbers describe a short list of priority procedures — hip and knee replacements, cataracts, cancer surgery, radiation, hip fracture repair, MRI and CT — not the minutes someone spends on hold trying to book a family-medicine visit. The Canadian Institute for Health Information’s 2025 report shows that in 2024 the country completed substantially more of those procedures than in 2019, while several benchmark-attainment rates and imaging waits remained worse than before the pandemic. That is a real system story. It is not a clinic phone-access story, and treating the two as interchangeable is how planners talk past front-office staff.

What CIHI actually measured in the 2025 release

On 12 June 2025, CIHI published Wait times for priority procedures in Canada, 2025, covering activity through 2024 against a 2019 pre-pandemic baseline. The volume sentence on the landing page is the cleanest summary available:

In 2024, there were 26% more hip replacements, 21% more knee replacements, 11% more cataract surgeries, 7% more cancer surgeries and 16% more MRI and CT scans completed across Canada than in 2019.

More completed procedures is not the same as shorter waits. CIHI’s own framing is that surgical volumes recovered and in several categories exceeded 2019, while the share of patients treated within recommended benchmarks often remained below pre-pandemic levels, and diagnostic imaging median waits lengthened.

Benchmarks: where patients still wait past the target

The same report’s attainment figures are the ones most often quoted in Canadian health debate, and they should be quoted with the benchmark attached — not as free-floating percentages.

For joint replacement, CIHI reports that in 2024 more patients across Canada received hip (68%) and knee (61%) replacements within the recommended 6 months, compared with recent prior years, while those shares remained below 2019 levels. CIHI’s accompanying news release restates the same rates against a 26-week benchmark wording (68% for hip, 61% for knee), versus 75% and 70% respectively in 2019. Six months and 26 weeks are the same target written two ways; the percentages are not in dispute between the landing page and the release.

For cataracts, 69% of patients were treated within the recommended 112 days (the news release’s parallel wording is the 16-week benchmark), versus 70% in 2019. Radiation therapy within 28 days stood at 94%, and hip fracture repair within 48 hours at 83% — each three percentage points below 2019. Median waits for cancer surgery rose by one to five days for most tumour sites, with prostate surgery showing the largest increase at nine days.

Diagnostic imaging is the clearest “longer than 2019” line in the report: median wait times rose by 15 days for MRI scans and by 3 days for CT scans over that period.

Why these numbers are not a clinic’s phone metric

CIHI priority wait times generally start when a specialist decides that a procedure is needed and stop when the procedure is performed. They do not start when a patient first tries to reach a family physician. They do not count abandoned calls, evening voicemail, or the days spent waiting for a referral appointment before the priority clock even begins. Provincial reporting also differs from pan-Canadian definitions enough that CIHI publishes exception notes for readers who drill into the interactive tool — a reminder that even within this carefully defined domain, jurisdictions are not perfectly interchangeable.

That non-comparability is the editorial point of putting this release next to primary-care access writing. England publishes monthly counts of general practice appointments and same-day shares; Canada’s best national wait dashboard publishes specialist-procedure benchmarks. Both are high-quality public statistics. Neither answers “did the clinic pick up?” A reader jumping from NHS GP appointment access to CIHI hips and knees without naming the unit of analysis will invent a false league table.

The closer operational cousin to clinic telephony is the US after-hours phone gap — unanswered evening demand that never becomes a scheduled visit — laid out in after-hours calls as a practice cost. Canadian clinics face their own version of that problem under different payment and provincial rules; CIHI’s 2025 charts will not reveal it.

How to use the 2025 report without misusing it

Canada did more priority procedures in 2024 than in 2019. Many patients still cleared their benchmarks less often than before the pandemic, and people waited longer for MRI. Those are CIHI’s findings, and they are enough without conscripting them into a story about who answered the clinic phone.

For clinic operators, the practical split is simple. Use CIHI when the board asks whether surgical and imaging throughput recovered after the pandemic, and whether benchmark attainment is still lagging. Use local telephony and booking dashboards when the board asks whether patients can reach the clinic to start any of that pathway. A practice that improves after-hours confirmation will not move the national MRI median by fifteen days — and a province that shortens hip-replacement waits will not automatically empty the primary-care phone queue. Keeping those sentences separate is how Canadian access debates stay honest.

For English-language context on scheduling and access product work, see Arbol’s English home.