Waiting lists for symptomatic joint arthritis are not benign

Waiting lists for surgery.

© 2002 Canadian Medical Association S waiting lists are seen by many as epitomizing the shortcomings of our public health care system. Yet, they can also be interpreted as being the result of a societal compromise between the founders’ promise of universal access to care and the reality of currently committed resources. Regardless of one’s perception, the debate about the “appropriate length” o...

Influencing Waiting Lists

In many settings, randomly arriving objects are offered successively to agents according to their fixed order in a waiting list. Though it is costly to wait, an agent may prefer to decline an offered object in order to wait for a better one (e.g. as in perhaps the most significant of such environments, the assignment of donor organs to queued patients). We consider the welfare consequences of i...

Symptomatic manubriosternal joint involvement in rheumatoid arthritis.

The manubriosternal joint is commonly involved in rheumatoid arthritis but rarely gives rise to symptoms. A patient is reported with seropositive, erosive rheumatoid arthritis, who developed symptoms resembling pleuritic pain, arising from synovitis of the manubriosternal joint. Treatment with intra-articular steroid injection resolved these symptoms rapidly.

Adult tonsillectomy--are long waiting lists putting patients at risk?

There is a paucity of data on morbidity associated with long waiting lists for adult tonsillectomy. The aim of this study was to assess the morbidity associated with long waiting lists for adult tonsillectomy in a developing world setting. Of 350 patients on the waiting list at Groote Schuur Hospital for 18 months or more, only 55 were contactable. This low yield (15.7%) from the telephonic sur...

Managing waiting lists for cardiac surgery.