Who is Eligible for PET Scans in Ontario?

When government insistence on cutting costs runs up against increasingly technologically advanced modern medicine, the resulting tangle of public health regulation can be just as complicated and unhelpful as the convoluted policies of any private health insurance company. An excellent example of this is the current situation for Ontario residents seeking PET scans. I'm providing this page as a guide for Ontario residents and an illustration of medical rationing gone mad.

PET scans, including combined PET/CT scans (the current standard of care), are an important tool in detecting, staging, and restaging many types of cancer, including lymphoma. PET scans may use a mildly radioactive tracer molecule, like FDG, which is absorbed in the body like sugar. Cancerous cells tend to demand more than their fair share of sugar, so they light up on the PET scan. Or they do in some provinces, anyways. According to the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH), Quebec, with a population of about 8 million, conducts 21,000 PET scans a year. Ontario, with a population in excess of 13 million, funded just 2000 PET scans a year, although that number is probably now increasing substantially thanks to new funding provisions.

In the Ontario provincial healthcare system, there are several methods for qualifying for a PET scan from PET Scans Ontario. The bright side is, there's no waiting list. Unfortunately, that's because PET scans are strictly rationed. Only one of the criteria is directly relevant to lymphoma patients, and it includes only some lymphoma patients:

PET Scans in Canada

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a type of advanced medical scanning which takes a 3-dimensional image of the body. Most commonly, a tracer molecule such as FDG (which contains glucose, or sugar) is used. The PET scan then detects areas of substantial "pickup," or accumulation, of FDG in the body. Because tumours tend to actively take up glucose, they can be more easily spotted on the scan. Today some centres operate combined PET/CT machines, which produce a composite image using both PET technology and CT (X-ray) technology.

Availability of PET scans, unfortunately, is one of many elements of healthcare that varies between provinces in terms of public funding and availability. For instance, Quebec performs about 21,000 PET scans per year, while Ontario performs only 2000 PET scans per year. Ontario's public funding for PET scans is very limited, although coverage has recently been expanded to several new conditions, including (in certain cases) lymphoma.

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