Bluewater Health officials say there are “no plans to scale down” cataract surgeries done at Charlotte Eleanor Englehart Hospital.

There have been concerns voiced by health advocates about the fate of the surgeries in local hospitals as the province ramps up three new private clinics to clear the backlog of nearly 14,000 cataract surgeries in Ontario.

In a February letter to the editor shortly after the provincial plan was announced, Shirley Roebuck, the head of the Sarnia-Lambton Health Coalition expressed concern about the fate of the Pat Mailloux Eye Care Clinic in Petrolia.

“Presently, all of the cataract surgeries occur at CEEH of Bluewater Health. But Premier Ford is building new cataract surgery clinics, in three areas of the province: Windsor, Waterloo and Ottawa. The majority of cataract surgery will be done at those for-profit clinics.

“This will rob our local public hospitals of services and our community of convenient surgeries performed in our home areas,” she wrote. It was a concern she raised again when talking to Lambton County Councillors April 5.

But Dr. Michel Haddad, Chief of Staff at Bluewater Health, has heard nothing about how the private clinics might affect the local eye clinic.

“If anything, actually our plans with the surgical team and our team is to do a bit more,” he tells The Independent.

About 15 trained staff at Pat Mailloux Eye Care Clinic perform 1,300 cataract surgeries every year,  operating two days a week.

The experience, from registration, to pre op, surgery and discharge, can take 20 minutes. “It used to take much longer in the past but with changes in technology and skills, over the years, it’s become pretty efficient and fast, actually,” Haddad says.

Lambton County has one of the shortest wait times for cataract surgery in the province. “Roughly 97 per cent of all our cataract patients are done within 84 days, which is less than three months,” the chief says.

“Some centers they wait six months, nine months, we’re basically three months mark.”

The key to the speed is the process.

The Pat Mailloux Eye Care Centre only does cataract surgery.

“They’re not mixed in with a general or population where there could be more complicated patients and the processing of patients pre op to go into the OR might actually be slower, because they’re dealing with more complicated patients or complicated procedures,” says Haddad.

Instead, each surgery takes approximately the same time to prepare for and complete so people can be scheduled more accurately. “It’s faster in  and faster out.

“So I think it’s a fairly efficient system. And it’ll be hard for anyone to compete with it, including private clinics,” says Haddad.

The province is hoping to save money with efficiency, doing more surgeries in less time.  “But we are, as a hospital, quite capable of being competitive,” Haddad added. The chief of staff wouldn’t speculate why the province had turned to private clinics to gain efficiency but says adding private clinics is not the whole solution.

“The answer is not simply having more clinics because we seem to be limited by what we call health human resources, HR and staffing. So, we can build more hospital beds – private or public – but the issue is we need to have people to do the procedures and staffing is really the bottleneck regardless of how delivered.”

As the province ramps up the private clinics, Haddad says Bluewater Health thinks it can find even more efficiencies and hopes to perform another 300 surgeries in 2023 at the Petrolia eye clinic.