Since Santé Québec took over a medical dashboard from the provincial Health Ministry in February, statistics intended for the public on wait times for heart surgery have plummeted — but the reality couldn’t be further from the truth, The Gazette can reveal.
According to Santé Québec’s online dashboard, the number of cardiac-surgery patients on wait lists has plunged from a near-record of 1,325 on Aug. 23 last year — with 850 waiting beyond medically acceptable delays and therefore at risk of sudden death — to 550 on Feb. 7. But those numbers are unreliable, since the Institut de cardiologie de Montréal has stopped providing data on its wait times.
“The crisis has deepened,” Dr. Louis Perrault, president of the Association des chirurgiens cardio-vasculaires et thoraciques du Québec, said in an interview Monday.
“You would think that Santé Québec would invest a little bit to get accurate data on wait lists. They manipulated stuff before, when they said that there are fewer patients waiting more than one year for other kinds of surgeries.”
In what appears to be a coincidence, the heart-surgery stats on Santé Québec’s dashboard started falling soon after The Gazette published an exposé last summer on a rising number of heart patients who died suddenly while on wait lists.
Asked whether he thought the public was being gaslit by the rosier stats, Perrault responded: “Well, obviously when I’m dealing with them I’m trying not to be too paranoid, but it looks like it, because it doesn’t make sense that the wait times were critical before and now they don’t even care if some centres don’t even enter the figures in the database.”
“For clinicians, it’s unacceptable,” Perrault added. “There should be a law, it should be compulsory that the different hospitals have complete, thorough and immediately up-to-date wait lists. In the first design of this dashboard, I wanted it to be live, like up-to-the-minute, day-to-day. You operate on a patient, the wait list goes down by one person, like it is in New Brunswick and Ontario.”
Dubé’s dashboard
Heart-surgery stats on Santé Québec’s dashboard started falling soon after The Gazette published an exposé last summer. JEAN-SEBASTIEN EVRARD/AFP/Getty Images JEAN-SEBASTIEN EVRARD/AFP/Getty Images
The dashboard was the brainchild of former health minister Christian Dubé, a self-described “numbers guy” who wanted to keep better track of Quebec’s medical system. At the same time, Dubé touted the dashboard as an example of greater government transparency.
With little fanfare, Santé Québec assumed control of the dashboard on Feb. 17. The Crown corporation was established in December 2024 with the mandate to run Quebec’s $66.8-billion health and social services network more efficiently. But critics have charged that Santé Québec, under chief executive officer Geneviève Biron, has been less transparent with the public than the Health Ministry.
Dr. Bernard Cantin, president of the Association des cardiologues du Québec, shared Perrault’s skepticism regarding the missing data for heart operations.
“If you don’t want to face the problem, just ignore it,” Cantin said, suggesting budget cuts may also be behind the lack of complete data.
“Santé Québec is asking us to cut the budgets and so they’re cutting in different places,” Cantin explained.
A spokesperson for the Institut de cardiologie de Montréal (ICM) was not immediately able to provide The Gazette with its figures on the latest surgical wait times.
Santé Québec’s explanation
Source: Santé Québec
We don’t hear from them. It’s radio silence. We don’t know who’s in charge (at Santé Québec).
Dr. Louis Perrault
Association des chirurgiens cardio-vasculaires et thoraciques du Québec
An official with Santé Québec first advised a reporter to contact the ICM, but on Monday evening she emailed a statement explaining the reasons for the missing numbers.
“The drop in requests (for heart surgery) is due to the ramping down of data from the SGAS information system to SIMASS (Opéra),”
Geneviève Bettez said in her email without elaborating on the two systems. “As a result, the ICM is not transmitting its information to the centralized systems. System adjustments are underway. Once the corrections are implemented, the data will be displayed retroactively.”
Perrault lamented the backlog of heart surgeries in Quebec, noting that five patients died suddenly while on wait lists at the ICM last year. He blamed lengthy wait times on a severe shortage of perfusionists, the professionals who run the heart-and-lung machines necessary for coronary bypass operations.
“It makes me very sad and disappointed about our system, and a little bit frantic because it’s so frustrating when you cannot get access to the people who will decide the fate of patients,” he said.
“We’re a G7 nation, we have the operating rooms, we have the doctors, sometimes we don’t have the nurses. We clearly don’t have the perfusionists, but we have the treatment. And yet people are dying because they don’t get access to the health system. It’s maddening. It’s actually frightening. And now we’re blind as to the extent of the problem because we don’t have all the data.”
Perrault also blasted Santé Québec for showing scant interest in working with heart surgeons and cardiologists to reduce the backlog.
“We don’t hear from them. It’s radio silence. We don’t know who’s in charge.”
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