Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Waiting lists for health services are often the bane of health care administrators, health care providers and the patients who find themselves waiting to access services. Wait time length can be considered an indicator of the overall health of the health care system. Researchers have spent considerable effort to improve the management of waiting lists for elective health care services. However, an area of inquiry that has been largely overlooked in the waiting list literature is the patients' perspective and experience. Statistics Canada gauged the number of Canadians who experienced difficulties getting non-emergency surgery and an estimated 162,000 adults or 10.5% of those who had such surgery reported one or more difficulty. The most commonly cited difficulty was "waited too long for surgery". What do patients experience while they wait for surgery, especially those who perceive the wait to be "too long"? The current research hypothesizes that the impact of waiting has a differential effect for various groups of patients, and that appreciation of the effects of waiting may become an integral part of waiting list management. The study will comprise two research phases and employ both qualitative and quantitative methods. The first phase will be an exploratory examination of the perspectives of patients who are currently on elective surgical wait lists for orthopedic and cardiac surgery. In depth qualitative interviews will be conducted to examine the waiting experience from the patients' perspective. The second phase of the study will build on the findings from the first phase. That is, specific measures of the constructs investigated in phase one will be surveyed in patients about to undergo orthopedic and cardiac surgery after being on a wait list. Health related quality of life measures will be collected three months post procedure.