Abstract

The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care officially announced Ontario's Wait Time Strategy on November 17, 2004, to address timely healthcare access to five key areas: cancer surgery, cataract surgery, hip and knee joint replacement surgery, cardiac procedures and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography scans (Trypuc et al. 2006). The goal of the Wait Time Strategy was to reduce the time patients wait for these five identified services by December 2006 by funding new innovative evidence-based strategies to help transform the current healthcare system into a more efficient and accountable model with an increasing degree of transparency (Hudson 2006).