Study: More than 45,000 Canadians sought treatment abroad in 2015
VANCOUVER — Tens of thousands of Canadians left the country last year for non-emergency medical procedures, the Fraser Institute says, but some health experts are challenging the way researchers at the think tank crunched the numbers in its new study.
The Fraser Institute released a report on Wednesday suggesting 45,619 people sought health-care services abroad in 2015 and pointed to wait times as the principal culprit.
“We have some good data from physicians that point to a general estimation of how many Canadians are travelling abroad,” said Bacchus Barua, a senior analyst of health policy at the Vancouver-based institute.
The study used results from the Fraser Institute’s annual survey asking physicians to assign a percentage to the number of their patients who reported receiving treatment abroad. Those values were then applied to the total number of medical procedures carried out in Canada, as recorded by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.