transplant surgery booked in September 2021 but, barely a week after securing the date, the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) postponed her operation – along with thousands of other surgeries so they could reassign staff amid COVID-19 pressures on the health system.
Read more: More people in Saskatchewan died waiting for surgery during COVID-19 than before: data Read next: Part of the Sun breaks free and forms a strange vortex, baffling scientists Bailey finally received the transplant last November, nearly four years after she was first diagnosed with kidney failure.“(I) didn’t think it was going to happen, for the struggle that I was going through,” she said. “There’s not even a word for it.
It’s just like you’re basically getting your life back.”A new report shows that’s happening for more and more people, with the number of organ transplant surgeries approaching 2019 levels after the COVID-19 pandemic delayed so many, by “(placing) an unprecedented burden on health care systems in Canada and around the world.”According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), 2,750 solid organ transplants were performed in Canada in 2021, which is only eight per cent less than the 2019 amount.The amount of dead and living donors is also rebounding.“There’s certainly an impact and one that I expect to continue to have a catch-up period,” CIHI researcher Nicole De Guia said, adding that the numbers don’t capture people who need organs but who weren’t on waitlists.The report, which gathers information from provincial health and transplant organizations, says 1,673 kidney transplants took place nationally in 2021, with 3,060 people still waiting for the procedure.And it found that 105 people died waiting.