Prostate centre cuts diagnostic wait times
Wednesday October 31, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
Ontario’s first community hospital-based prostate assessment centre has opened at North York General Hospital.

Since the centre opened in July, Dr. Roger Buckley, the medical director of the Gale and Graham Wright Prostate Centre and the chief of urology at North York General Hospital, says diagnostic wait times have decreased by two-thirds.

The Gale and Graham Wright Prostate Centre is a partnership between North York General Hospital and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Teams of inter-dicsiplinary professionals from both organizations collaborated over the summer to get the centre up and running.

Buckley says three years ago at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, the estimated length of wait from the time of referral to the decision to proceed with treatment was about 35 weeks. In the province of Ontario, it currently takes about 13 weeks to get a definitive prostate cancer diagnosis. The prostate assessment centre has helped reduce that wait to an average of four or five weeks.

While there are prostate centres at academic hospitals in Toronto, Buckley says services aren’t available in the same location meaning patients have to travel from one site to another.

“This is the first prostate centre in a community hospital where the radiation oncologists are coming out . . . so the patient doesn’t have to travel all over the place,” Buckley says. “It’s a unique concept of making it easier for the patient to have everything done all in one site.”

Unlike prostate centres at the academic hospitals, Buckley says patients can visit the centre at North York General Hospital simply for a check-up and don’t need to be diagnosed with prostate cancer to be seen.

When a patient arrives at the centre, they’re examined and it is determined whether or not a biopsy is needed to test for cancer. Once the biopsies have been taken and analyzed, an appointment is schedule to discuss the results, be they positive or negative. For patients testing positive, treatment options are discussed. Volunteers with Man to Man, a Toronto-based prostate centre support group, are also available to counsel patients.

If a patient tests negative, they’re referred back to their family doctor or the referring urologist.

What used to take months can now be accomplished in four to five weeks.

“The one thing that may increase it is the patient taking some time to make the decision,” Buckley says. “Some of them, even though we can counsel them fairly quickly, they take a few weeks to mull things over and decide what’s appropriate for them.”

North York General Hospital and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre are both Healthcare Insurance Reciprocal of Canada (HIROC) subscribers.