Quebec's Heart Surgery Waitlist Crisis: Data Gap & Dying Patients

0:00It's March 31st, Canada news today starts now, AI powered and ready. I'm Corey with the story. Quebec's new health boss, Sanset Quebec, took over the public dashboard tracking heart surgery way times back in February and get this, the numbers. Look way better now. Last August 23rd, there were 1,325 patients waiting with 850 past safe limits and risking. Sudden death. By February 7th, it dropped to just 550, but hold up, that's smoke and mirrors. The real issue? The Institute, Decardial, All-A-G, Demontriol, a major player, straight up stopped sending their data. This plunge kicked off right after a big expose last summer, highlighted patients dying on those lists. Meanwhile, the dashboard was former health minister Christian DuBais pride and joy, pitched as a transparency win for the $66.8 billion dollar system. Doctors are fired up. Dr. Louis Perot, head of Quebec's heart surgeons, calls it a deepening crisis.

1:03Feels like gaslighting when weights were critical before and now key. Spots goes the stats. Dr. Bernard Canton, from cardiologist agrees, pointing to budget cuts, making hospitals ignore the mess. Last year alone, 5 patients at the ICM died suddenly waiting, blamed on a dire shortage of perfusionists who run those critical heart-lung machines. Sante Quebec finally chimed in with a technical excuse. They're switching from one data system to another, so the ICM's info isn't flowing. Spokesperson Genevieve Betis says fixes are coming and numbers will update retroactively. But Perot says it's radio silence, no real collab with docs to clear the backlog. Bottom line, folks are still dying without timely ops and a G7 spot like ours, and without full data, we're flying blind on how bad it really is. Time for mandatory real-time tracking to save lives.