The Erie St. Clair Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) has made some significant strides lately to improve wait times in areas like hip replacements.
But there is still some more work to be done.
Out of 14 LHINs in Ontario, the Chatham area LHIN ranks second in home personal support workers and fourth in home nursing and CT scan wait times respectively.
However, it ranks ninth in knee surgery wait times, 11th and 12th in repeat visits to the ER for mental health and substance abuse respectively and 12th in satisfaction.
LHIN Director of Performance, Peter Crvenkovski, says the LHIN is fifth in hip surgery wait times mainly because of the recent success in Chatham.
"The huge improvement has been here in Chatham. Working with the orthopods here in Chatham, implementing some of these findings, we've been able to go from a 33% hitting the target to a great 90%," says Crvenkovski.
The Erie St. Clair LHIN is middle of the pack when it comes to CCAC home services, emergency room length of stay, and MRI waits.
Crvenkovski says knee replacements need to improve and there's still some work to be done in that area.
"We're going to try the same methodology and work on our knee replacement surgeries now so we can hopefully replicate the results that we've had in the area," Crvenkovski says.
Crvenkovski says mental health and addictions need more attention if they're going to improve.
"I think what we want to do is get more upstream and figure out what can we do with the pain earlier in terms of restorative care for instance to lower the pain for lower back pain as an example. So, hopefully it'll have an impact as well," says Crvenkovski.