British Columbia Surgical Wait Times from Fiscal Year 2009/10

Elective surgical wait times for inpatient and day surgery cases in British Columbia, tracked from fiscal year 2009/10 onward. The Government of British Columbia provides quarterly and annual files, including counts of cases waiting and completed, plus 50th and 90th percentile wait times in weeks. Data excludes unscheduled surgeries and suppresses values less than 5.

Use Cases

• Monitor healthcare system performance based on quarterly and annual wait time percentiles.
• Analyze trends in elective surgery backlog based on counts of cases waiting and completed.
• Compare surgical wait times across different fiscal years based on historical data files.
• Assess the impact of reporting changes based on the dataset's restatement policy.

Strengths

• Time series spans from fiscal year 2009/10 to the present, providing over a decade of data.
• Provides three distinct files for analysis: interim quarterly, historical quarterly, and historical annual.
• Wait time metrics include both 50th and 90th percentile calculations in weeks.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data excludes unscheduled surgical cases, limiting completeness for total surgical volume.

Provenance

Source

Government of British Columbia

Collection Method

Administrative data collected by the Ministry of Health and health authorities.

Time Range

Fiscal year 2009/10 to current.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-17 15:32:02.780452; freshness should be verified.

Geography

British Columbia, Canada.